A recent experiment claims to falsify both the Copenhagen and the MW
interpretation of quantum Mechanics but provides results which conforms to the
Transactional Interpretation. This is an idea developed from the Wheeler Feynman
absorber theory by Dr. Cramer of the University of Washington. I have a useful
link which talks about this though the actual paper is not yet available.
There has a flurry of emails back and forth today on this and I have
a reply from Dr. Cramer which is below the link and provides some additional
links. If this pans out this is big news though of course it's too early to be
sure.
In my opinion, the Afshar Experiment falsifies both the
Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation by demonstrating in a
two-pinhole setup the presence of complete wave interference in an unambiguous “
which way” measurement. My Transactional Interpretation (see http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/theory.html ) has no problem in explaining what Afshar
observes.
Afshar is a Visiting Scientist in the Harvard Physics Department. He was
planning to submit a paper about his experiment to Physical Review Letters last
week, but I haven’t heard for sure that he in fact did this. He has the
experiment set up in the old High Energy Physics Lab building at Harvard and I have
seen it in operation.
-----Original Message-----
From: RBZannelli@aol.com [mailto:RBZannelli@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 11:48 AM
To: cramer@phys.washington.edu
Subject: Afshar's Experiment
Dear Dr. Cramer:
There seems to be quite a stir about an experiment conducted by Dr.
Afshar which makes the claim that it falsifies both Copenhagen and the many
worlds interpretations of QM. However, there seems to be no information available
about the details of this experiment.
In all honesty I am highly skeptical of these claims. Nevertheless, if
true, this would be very big news. Could you provide any clarification on this? .
Is there a paper available on this?