I have been thinking about the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TIQM) lately. My BS in Electrical Engineering gave me some background in physics. I have also tried to follow some of the current discussions in physics and astronomy. However, I am just an amateur in physics. That being said, I think the discussion of advance and retarded waves in physics and quantum mechanics has some interesting possibilities. As most are aware, light has been thought of as both a particle and a wave. It seems to have characteristics of both. In particular, one advantage of the particle analogy is that we think of a particle as something solid, as denser. If something hits the front of a solid object, we think of the force as being efficiently transferred quickly to the back of the solid. On the other hand, we think of the wave analogy as something cushier, more amorphous, as less dense. If something hits the front of a wave we think of a certain kind of compression factor to the collision, the force of the collision gets distributed and diluted more into the flexibility and dispersion of the ‘wave objects’. It is more like hitting a concrete wall in our car as opposed to a rose bush. The odd thing about the light wave is that it appears to have both of these characteristics, particle and wave. What this means is when a photon of light ‘hits’ something it hits it like a wave but the source of the wave also gets ‘hit’ with something like waves before the collision (called advance waves) and after the collision (called retarded waves). This means that the source ‘feels’ the effects of the collision before the main amplitude, or strongest force of the impact gets to the source. So, like a solid in an impact, there is some advancing ‘premonition’ that an impact is going to occur in the source prior to the source getting ‘hit’ with the big one so to speak. The ‘big one’ is really just the result of the highest magnitude force line hitting the source; where the resultant inference force lines get more intense and closer together when they reflect back to the source. Well, actually this is the way a solid experiences a collision to. It is just a matter of magnitudes that changes but the common sense notion that the solid ‘knows’ faster than the wave that an impact is occurring is a fallacy. Actually, both the solid and the wave know in advance of the major magnitudes of the collision that a collision is imminent. These ideas are a part of physics called standing waves. Another way to think about it is two bicyclists heading directly towards each other. Air waves are being compressed directly in front of the direction of travel for each bicyclist and expanded behind the direction of travel of each bicyclist. Just before the bicyclists actually collide the advance waves are colliding; what we might call potentially colliding. After the collision, the trailing waves also collide which we could also call potentially colliding. So, we have a potential colliding ahead of, or in the future of, the actual collision and a potential colliding behind, or in the past of, the actual collision. So what are waves?

We can think of waves as energy fields or potential probabilities of finding higher and lower energies in ‘fields’ of a plane or better, ‘fields’ of a cube or even better, ‘fields’ of a cube where the ‘fields’ are changing in time, pulsating. In quantum mechanics (QM) we may think of the these ‘fields’ as the probability of finding an electron in a ‘field’. We could also call this a cloud or a potential energy field. Now, in QM we say that these fields are discrete or quantums. In other words, we do not see an analog kind of ‘energy clouds’ in one potential field ‘bumping’ or ‘merging’ into adjacent ‘energy clouds’ of another potential field. This does mean that it does not happen, only that we cannot detect any interaction in-between the quantum fields. We say there is zero probability of finding an electron in-between two quantum shells. Now, the inability to detect pre or post waves or in-between energy fields leads to something we call stochastic. Stochastic means there is a certain kind of randomness in a probability event. In other words, when we are thinking of which energy field or cloud we are going to find an electron around the nucleus of an atom we know the discrete shells where we may find the electron and we know the probabilities of where we are more likely and less likely to find the electron in discrete energy shells around the nucleus but we do not know exactly which shell the electron will be in. Therefore, we must put up with a certain amount of randomness in our equations which cannot be resolved or specified in an exact quantum location. We call this indeterminate but not absolutely indeterminate only relatively indeterminate within some probabilities. This is called stochastic. Physicists are not totally comfortable with this mushiness. This mushiness in the fundamentals of physics is called non-causal or acausal. Cause is another common sense notion that if something happens, an event, something else must have caused it. However, if you see something happen and then you have to admit that there is no cause that we know of, you are getting into the most dreaded topic of every physicist… magic, religion, superstition, mystic, hocus pocus or as Newton called gravity, action at a distance. This kind of metaphysical attack on science goes right to the core of the ‘truth’ of science and can, potentially, get a bad reaction if suggested in the presence of a scientist. Be that as it may, there are theories that try to find a causal relationship in QM. Einstein comes immediately to mind with his unified field theory; but, there are others which are more current.

First, one important point to make here is that we have been thinking of standing waves as a spatial metaphor. This is fine for visualizing how waves and interference waves may interact but there is one more hiccup we need to add to our metaphor, time. Now we know that time and space is a continuum. When we say this, we are really saying that time and space is really the same ‘thing’ just as energy and mass is the same ‘thing’ and the wave and particle of light is the ‘same’ thing. What we mean is that the common sense notions we have of these ‘things’ share some characteristics with their metonyms. Let’s just say that all these ways of thinking allegorically aid our understanding but they are merely aids not the ‘thing-in-itself’ as Kant may tell us. Even the language of math which is much more precise is STILL a language albeit, a shorthand, exact language but it is not the thing-in-itself. Ah, but this gets us into the dreaded ‘philosophy’ doesn’t it? In any case, because we know that space and time are relative to each other we cannot say that waves only apply to space. We also have to think waves in terms of time. What does this mean in terms of our present discussion?

Well, instead of ahead of or behind, advance or retard, we are now left with in the future and in the past…wow. What we are suggesting is that the future comes towards us before presence or the present and the past comes from behind presence or the present. We encounter time as waves. We may call the future and the past potential but we tend to want to add an additional qualification to this, the past, we think, already happened. This has been called the arrow of time in physics. We think of the past as the ‘dead’ past as it already happened and it can’t be changed, right? Well in physics this additional quality is not such a given as you would suspiciously suspect. In physics, if something is acausal it cannot be reversed. An event that has nothing which definitely led up to it to cause it to occur cannot be reversed because we do not know what the exact mechanism is which allowed it to happen in the first place; it was stochastic. Perhaps, we can say something about the future because we have probabilities which can guide our predictions but the past is a total void once it has happened; we got here but we do not exactly how we got here. If we understood the mechanism of how we got here it may be possible to reverse it and, in this case, go back in time.

Currently, the way we ‘go back in time’ in physics is to look at all the effects of an event and knowing how things interact, abstractly put this knowledge together to come up with a theory or understanding of the event that must have happened for the effects to be what they are. If we look at an explosion and see all the pieces flying apart we can analyze all the forces that are acting on all the pieces to understand the trajectory of the pieces and therefore, abstractly reverse the trajectory to find the original object that blew apart. This is what particle accelerators do for scientists. They can determine what objects must have been in the past based on what they see in the present. Now, this is not the same as actually going back in time but the information is reversible. In other words, information is retained in the explosion we cited above. We can go forward and backward in time and find informational causal relations in both directions. This seems to be a unique characteristic of information we do not find in what we call ‘the real world’. Ah, but physicists think the ‘real world’ is for amateurs anyway. In any case, there is some kind of difference, we think, between information and an ‘event’. Even though ‘an event’ is still a linguistic metaphor for the thing-in-itself we are content to leave it there…unless we are a physicist or philosopher.

Let’s suppose that we could come up with a math which we cannot find an actual ‘thing’ in the ‘real world’ that corresponds to it (ah, but why let trivial matters get in the way) but would explain QM in a causal way. Yes, you guessed it, there is such a thing in physics. It is called transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TIQM). Let’s suppose that we have a transmitter we will call a source and a receiver we will call a sink. The source radiates energy fields which pulsate in a wave like fashion towards the sink. The sink is not a black hole, empty void just ‘receiving’ as common sense might dictate. The sink is actually a transmitter to. The sink transmits a weak energy field and looks for any interference in the field to detect any other electromagnetic field which may have changed its original radiation pattern. If it detects this interference pattern it decodes it and decides what kind of other electromagnetic field must have been present to distort the sink field as it detected. All sensors are receivers of some type or another. To get back to the standing wave metaphor, look at this diagram of our transmitter (TX) and our receiver (RX).

As the transmitter pulses electrons or pulsating fields of potential energy the receiver does as well. The waves are compressed ahead of the direction and expanded behind the direction of flow. This is due to the speed of light. Remember, as you get closer to the speed of light length contracts, gets shorter, and time dilates, gets slower. Therefore, ahead of the pulsating energy field of the transmitter and the receiver the peak amplitudes of the waves appear to compress as they move towards each other near the speed of light and they appear to lengthen as they appear to move slower behind the pulsating energy field. From the relative perspective of the collision point of the two fields, the waves in front are appearing to slow down to get shorter relative to each other and the waves in back appear to get longer relative to each other. From a time perspective of the collision point, the waves are coming from both sides of you faster as they get closer to you and trailing off in waves that appear to be moving away from you slowly. Remember the ‘waves’ are really higher amplitude potential fields where we are more likely to find electrons and the spacing between the waves are related to their quantum shells. When the two approaching waves collide TIQM calls this a transaction. When the two waves collide they generate their own set of interference waves. The interference waves after the transaction will look like the original waves. The interference waves will contain the same amount of energy as the two original waves which collided. Even in the interference waves, there will be waves which proceed ahead of the collision point and behind the collision point. This happens for both the transmitter and the receiver. The shell of the transmitting wave which collides with the transmitted wave from the receiver generates a collision wave which races towards the receiver and back towards the transmitter where it originated. The resultant wave which heads towards the receiver is called the offer wave and the one which goes back to the original transmitter is called the confirmation wave. The confirmation wave informs, provides information to the original transmitter that something happened in its electromagnetic field and likewise the offer wave conveys to the receiver that something happened in its radiated electromagnetic field. Also, remember that this happens in both directions as the receiver is really a transmitter itself. What this actually means is that the transmitter and the receiver are both sources and sinks. We can also think of sources and sinks as emitters and absorbers.

Quantum energy always wants to return to a balanced state. Now in QM there is a sort of bubbling, gurgling steady state of particles thought as coming into and out of existence by some which underlies physics, the universe or more interesting what the ancient Greeks called phusis (more on that in the philosophy series). A balanced state is when all the unbalanced energy finds absorbers. This does not mean the energy disappears. It means the energy settles down within certain boundary conditions. Quantum energy is always ‘moving’, if you will, which is why it does not take much to push it out of its boundaries. However, when the push and shove are over it wants to settle down in a kind of randomized ‘bubbling’ and ‘gurgling’. These metaphors may be a bit colorful but they really indicate an absorber state where, relatively speaking, no one is pushing anyone else around too much. The emitter is the hell raiser in the bunch. The emitter gets everyone all worked up and in a pissing contest like drunken rednecks at a bar. Anyway, what is interesting is that the emitters are always getting advance notice of this ruckus from their own confirmation waves. When it comes to time-space continuum this really means that the emitters know ahead of time, in the future, that the ruckus is going to happen (like the wives of the drunken rednecks knew when their husbands left the house). In this way, TIQM tries to set up a causal connection to QM. If there really is a causal connection and we understood the mechanism, so to speak, we could perhaps reverse time at will. The downside of this is that this would also imply determinism.

In theology, determinism as thought by Calvin meant that some people were predetermined to go to heaven by God and some were predetermined to go to hell by God. Some folks objected saying that this could not be a God of love. The Calvinists simply used God’s answer to Job to respond and said, who are you to question God? If the big dog wants to predetermine and also wants to call that love, get over it; in any case, so much for freedom if TIQM is right. However, the upside or as Nietzsche called it, the great nausea, is that since everything can easily go forward and backward in a deterministic, causal fashion we will probably do it again, and again, and again, and again, ad infinitum. The only thing is how you do it, with fervor and zeal or hating every minute of it. Well, it does not matter since, as Groundhog Day showed us, you will get to do it both ways…forever. Ok, now that I have made your day maybe you want a scotch, I sure do.

Check this out if you want the unabridged version.