Jack Sargatti and friends discuss retrocausality from distant future, extracts from 3 posts today: Rich Murray 2010.09.09

[Rich Murray]

Jack Sargatti and friends discuss retrocausality from distant future,
extracts from 3 posts today: Rich Murray 2010.09.09

http://stardrive.org/
[hidden email]

[ JS: "It's a very, very profound idea," says Paul Davies.
"Aharonov's take on quantum mechanics can explain all the usual results that
the conventional interpretations can, but with the added bonus that it also
explains away nature's apparent indeterminism.
What's more, a theory in which the future can influence the past may have
huge -- and much needed -- repercussions for our understanding of the
universe, says Davies.

Jack Sarfatti and Fred Alan Wolf have been working on the idea that the
future can influence the past since the late 1960's when they were
professors in the physics department of San Diego State.
Nice that Paul Davies and others are now jumping on their bandwagon. ;-) ]


[ extracts from 3 posts by Jack Sarfatti 2010.09.09 ]

2nd draft
On Sep 9, 2010, at 6:10 PM, JACK SARFATTI wrote:

Or, The Emperor Really Has No Clothes

Here is an interesting talk with some good points I think clearly. ;-)
In any case I agree with his argument because I thought the same myself.

MAKING BOHMIAN MECHANICS
COMPATIBLE WITH RELATIVITY
AND QUANTUM FIELD THEORY
Hrvoje Nikoli´c
Rudjer Bo?skovi´c Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
Vallico Sotto, Italy, 28th August - 4th September 2010

It is frequently argued that:
1. Bohmian mechanics (BM) contradicts the theory of relativity
(because BM is nonlocal)
2. BM based on particle trajectories is not consistent with
particle creation/destruction in QFT
(because particle trajectories are continuous in BM)
The purpose of this talk is to show that BM can be formulated
such that:
- BM is nonlocal but relativistic covariant
- BM with continuous particle trajectories describes
particle creation/destruction in QFT ...

1.1 Relativistic Bohmian interpretation
- Nonlocality in BM requires superluminal (faster than light)
communication between particles.
- The most frequent argument that it is not compatible with relativity:
Superluminal communication
? there is a Lorentz frame in which communication is instantaneous
? there is a preferred Lorentz frame
? the principle of relativity is violated.
- However, this is not a valid argument, because
this is like using the following argument on subluminal communication:
Subluminal communication
? there is a Lorentz frame in which particle is at rest
? there is a preferred Lorentz frame
? the principle of relativity is violated.

The argument on subluminal communication is wrong:
- It is the general law of motion that must have the same form
in any Lorentz frame.
- A particular solution (a particle at rest with respect to some particular
Lorentz frame) does not need to have the same form
in all Lorentz frames.
But the argument on superluminal communication is
completely analogous.
? It is wrong for exactly the same reason:
- A particular solution (communication instantaneous with respect to
some particular Lorentz frame) does not need to have the same form
in all Lorentz frames.


BRAVO!
Another analogous case is spontaneous broken symmetry in the (off-shell)
virtual particle vacuum/many-real (on-shell) particle ground state in which
Goldstone phase rigid macro-quantum coherence emerges (P.W. Anderson's "More
is different.") e.g. Penrose-Onsager ODLRO in the reduced density matrices
with macroscopic eigenvalues.

CONCLUSIONS
- The usual formulation of BM is not relativistic covariant because
it is based on standard QM which is also not relativistic covariant.
- To make BM covariant ? first reformulate standard QM
in a covariant way!
? Treat time on an equal footing with space:
1. space probability density ? spacetime probability density
2. single-time wave function ? many-time wave function
- To make particle BM compatible with QFT and particle/destruction:
1. Represent QFT states with wave functions
(depending on an infinite number of coordinates).
2. Use quantum theory of measurements ?
effective collapse into states of definite number of particles.

On Sep 9, 2010, at 2:52 PM, nick herbert wrote:
?
Jack, I consider it silly for you to be making a fuss about who thought
first about future influencing the present. It is a very old idea, at least
as old as Aristotle (333 BC) and St Thomas Aquinas (1270 AD) who used the
term "final cause" to refer to any cause that lies in the future.?


JS:?Of course. Look who's talking about "silly"! Takes one to know one I
guess. At least I am not on "all fours." J?Kidding aside, there is a serious
priority issue here for the history of physics on how the idea of final
causation is now creeping back into mainstream physics in a highly technical
way (weak measurements, time machines, super oscillations). Hopefully David
Kaiser and other serious historians of physics will set the record straight.
?

The notion of a future cause is included in the scope of "teleology"--See
"teleology", "Aristotle" and "Aquinas" in Wikipedia. Aharonov came much much
later than these fine dudes. If you can prove that Sarfatti came up with the
notion of final cause before Aristotle that would be worth putting in the
history books.

??Like I came back from the future in a flying saucer and became Aristotle?
Kidding aside once more, I never made any such claim of course. I am quite
familiar with the history having minored in philosophy at Cornell with Max
Black et-al. Indeed I got an A in Mario Einaudi's course in Aquinas. I would
have made a good Jesuit like Jerry Brown.

Neither Feynman nor Aharonov have priority in proposing the notion of "final
cause."??

No one is making that claim either of course.

Aharonov's priority is in actually proposing an experiment to test whether
"final causes" exist in nature. Whether his experiment actually accomplishes
this end is a matter of some dispute.??

It's obvious to me that final cause is the only way to really understand
uncontrollable quantum randomness in the present and passion at a distance
in the entanglement of space-time separated subsystems.
Aharonov et-al are 100% correct on that score.
But that's only my opinion and unreasonable physicists who think they are
thinking clearly but aren't, have the right not to agree with me!
Of course, the important issue beyond that is signal nonlocality's strong
violation of quantum physics as normally understood.
I think that is necessary for life to exist in a non-equilibrium state (at
the level of the not-so-hidden variables).?

These are the logs of the starship NCC-1701-280Z.  Its five-year mission to
seek out new minds, new quantum realms.  To boldly explore physics where no
physicist  has gone before (in physical, virtual, or quantum worlds)!

Starmind(tm) -- Your daily journal to the industry's brightest stars.  You
get infinite knowledge only with Starmind:
All hits.  All Physics. All the time.  And now in parallel and diverging
universes.  (Thus proving they don't exist as separate entities -- But have
we gotten to them yet or not?)
- - - - - - Message From Starfleet  - - - (Read below) - - - - - - - - - - -
Join in our ongoing discussions and theoretical science writings:
http://groups.yahoo.com/messages/SarfattiScienceSeminars

Dr. Sarfatti may be reached at his e-mail or using Internet site:
http://stardrive.org
http://www.1st-books.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  
-
To respond or comment directly to the group's archive, reply via e-mail:
[hidden email]


Josephson's lecture is so important for the "Trouble in Physics" that I have
put it on the front page of stardrive.org

On Sep 9, 2010, at 9:23 AM, Brian Josephson wrote:

--On 9 September 2010 09:07:25 -0700 JACK SARFATTI <[hidden email]>
wrote:

All the mass media triggered by FQ Foundation support for Paul Davies
and Yakir is a major change. Curiously, Mike Towler elliptically made
fun of the whole back from the future idea in something I found
online. His Bohm Lectures are good, but his publication record is
very narrow - Monte Carlo calculations on very specialized solid
state problems - useful of course but what Pauli called "mud physics"
- his only fundamental work is just beginning with Valentini and
Basil. ...

My comment

Jack,

Scientists have to be careful what they theorise in order to avoid
'exclusion'.  Quoting time symmetry makes it kosher to speculate
that the future influences the present.  But in the real world the
future is always influencing the present -- I am about to set out
for the lab in a couple of minutes as there is something I am
(hopefully) be going to do there.  But that explanation involves
mentality and so is verboten.

may be quoted (with due attribution of course).

BTW, the thing I went to the lab for was uploading a 3GB video file to
youtube (took only 10 min. approx!):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrWVNy18pA>

This is a bit of the bdj70 lecture (Judith thought it would be good to put
it on to youtube as well as sms.cam to be more visible, and I include the
URL of the (more or less) complete talk there as you'll see).
To get in as much as possible there's only a brief view of the Camb. News
article (starting at 1:33).

Brian

* * * * * * *    Prof. Brian D. Josephson  [hidden email]
* Mind-Matter * Cavendish Lab., JJ Thomson Ave, Cambridge CB3 0HE, U.K.
* Unification *   voice: [phone] fax: [phone]
*   Project   *       WWW: http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10
* * * * * * *


Basil, what do you think about Hrvoje Nickolic's talk? I have a copy of it
and he makes some good points about the Red Herring that Bohm's ontology
contradicts special relativity. Indeed, Brian Josephson's remark that
theoretical physicists think they are thinking clearly because they are not
thinking clearly is very apt! ;-)

On Sep 9, 2010, at 1:39 AM, Basil Hiley wrote:

> On 8 Sep 2010, at 19:17, JACK SARFATTI wrote:
>
>> I just noticed that that article leaves out Bohm's name lost in the
>> obscurity of "codiscovered" for the shift of the interference pattern in
>> what is normally called the "Bohm-Aharonov" effect.
>>
>> when a physicist named Yakir Aharonov visited the neighboring Boston
>> University. Aharonov, now at Chapman with Tollaksen, was renowned for
>> having codiscovered a bizarre quantum mechanical effect in which
>> particles can be affected by electric and magnetic fields, even in
>> regions where those fields should have no reach.
>>
>> Aharonov was one of the first to take seriously the idea that if you want
>> to understand what is happening at any point in time, it's not just the
>> past that is relevant. It's also the future," Tollaksen says.
>>
>> Tollasken is ignorant here - unaware that Feynman had the idea, so did
>> I.J. Good, Hoyle et-al.
>>
>
> Jack, you are being a little harsh here.
>
> 1.  The word used is 'codiscovered' and that is fair enough, However
> remember the effect was actually discovered by two Birkbeck physicists in
> 1949, namely, Ehrenberg and Siday. (Proc. Phys. Soc. B 62 (1949), 8-21.)

Perhaps - it was not aimed at Yakir but at the writer of the article, which
is actually very good.
I am over-sensitive because now everyone is jumping on the retro-causal idea
leaving me and Fred Alan Wolf out of the history.
Hopefully, David Kaiser of MIT physics will contribute to correcting that
omission in his new book due Summer 2011.
This is not at all to subtract from Yakir's very important work on the
details that are key to testing the general idea of course.
Also I see that Yakir was working on the key idea since 1964 at Yeshiva
University.
I started thinking about it in 1961 or so at Brandeis when I read the David
Inglis Rev Mod Physics paper on the Tau-Theta puzzle and got into arguments
with Stan Deser and Sylvan Schweber about faster than light entanglement
(EPR).
They told me not to think about it!
I suppose it's possible that I.J. Good read Yakir's 1964 paper that led to
his discussion of the idea that we need the future post-selected boundary
condition in his "The Scientist Speculates"?
Fred Hoyle was very aware of this of course as the obvious explanation for
Bohr's uncontrollable quantum randomness.
Of course Tamara Davis's PhD 2004 and the discovery of dark energy puts this
in perspective.


> 2.  Again writing 'one of the first' is also fair enough.  In regard to
> this discussion you may be interested in a paper I eventually got
> published in 2001.  I attach a copy.
>
> Basil.


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