Notes for my book Star Gate:

The 1940 Wheeler-Feynman Back-From-Our-Future Direct-Interaction Theory

 

“By the term ‘action at a distance,’ we mean a relativistically invariant particle interaction, not the instantaneous action at a distance of Newton. … Fields are taken to possess further degrees of freedom that are not contained in the interparticle action … to explain the decay of excited states for example.  Our purpose … is to argue that all the results of physics, even those which are usually thought to arise from the independent degrees of freedom of fields, can be obtained from interparticle action – for decay … and scattering … alike … The essential difference between [local] field theory and … [nonlocal] direct-interaction theory is that one can consider local systems in isolation from the rest of the universe in the former, but not in the latter. The independent degrees of freedom of fields are … equivalent to the interaction of local systems with the [future] universe in the direct-interaction theory … the equivalence is found … in certain cosmological models, but not in others.” Fred Hoyle & J. V. Narlikar. “Action at a Distance in Physics and Cosmology” W. H. Freeman 1974.

 

In contrast to both local classical and quantum field theory, the Wheeler-Feynman idea of 1940, further developed by Hoyle and Narlikar and independently by John Cramer in his “transactional interpretation” of orthodox quantum theory whose nonlocal entanglements cannot be used to send signals faster-than-light and back-from-the-future, says that the laws of physics are not independent of the large-scale structure of our observable piece of the larger multiverse, i.e., “that the physical laws … already involve the universe as a whole.” This lends itself naturally to the idea of Gerardus ‘tHooft and Leonard Susskind that we are 3D hologram images projected from a 2D thermodynamic horizon hologram that in fact is a computer. Quite literally we are simulations in a virtual reality in this theory and we can hope that God does not pull the plug. This book is being written in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that started the same time as the Iceland volcano eruption that stopped air traffic to Europe. Indeed, it looks like we may indeed be going down the drain. We are actually sandwiched between a past-particle horizon and a future event horizon as shown by Tamara Davis in her 2004 Ph.D. dissertation done at the University of New South Wales. Unlike black hole horizons that we are outside of, we are inside our two afore-mentioned past and future cosmological horizons and we are always at their exact centers. Indeed, your past and future horizons are not exactly the same as mine, but the difference is tiny and ignorable. We are literally inside these bubbles. However, we will see that it’s our future bubble that is more important than our past bubble. Can the bubble be pricked with a pin?