Sutherland's remarkable paper.

 
 
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  • Jack Sarfatti bcc

    re: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0601095.pdf

    Costa de Beauregard had the key idea around 1956 (Feynman zig-zag)
    It’s also in Cramer’s TI and it all comes from Wheeler-Feynman.
    Retrocausality is natural in Feynman’s global Lagrangian path integral picture.
    Indeed, Feynman had this basic idea already in his 
    1948 Space-time approach to non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 20: 367- 387. 

    Bell’s locality inequality’s violation in experiment shows that local causes at the creation of the entangled pair is wrong.
    It proves that retrocausal local causes from the detections backwards in time to the creation event is the fact.
    This simulates spacelike influence in some arrangements between source and detectors. 
    Retrocausality suffices to explain clearly in a Lorentz invariant way why the spacetime separations between the detections does not matter for the entangled pair of particles.
    Special relativity only really says the speed of light is invariant in real gravity-free flat spacetime for global inertial observers. It does not need the extra baggage of only retarded past cause/future effect.

    key excerpts follow:

    CAUSALLY SYMMETRIC BOHM MODEL
    Roderick I. Sutherland
    Centre for Time, Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia
    Abstract
    "A version of Bohm’s model incorporating retrocausality is presented, the aim being to explain the nonlocality of Bell’s theorem while maintaining Lorentz invariance in the underlying ontology. The strengths and weaknesses of this alternative model are
    compared with those of the standard Bohm model

    The aim of this paper is to construct a version of Bohm’s model that also includes the existence of backwards-in-time influences in addition to the usual forwards causation. The motivation for this extension is to remove the need in the existing model for a preferred reference frame. As is well known, Bohm’s explanation for the nonlocality of
    Bell’s theorem necessarily involves instantaneous changes being produced at space-like separations, in conflict with the “spirit” of special relativity even though these changes are not directly observable. While this mechanism is quite adequate from a purely
    empirical perspective, the overwhelming experimental success of special relativity (together with the theory’s natural attractiveness), makes one reluctant to abandon it even at a “hidden” level. There are, of course, trade-offs to be made in formulating an alternative model and it is ultimately a matter of taste as to which is preferred. However,
    constructing an explicit example of a causally symmetric formalism allows the pros and cons of each version to be compared and highlights the consequences of imposing such symmetry1. In particular, in addition to providing a natural explanation for Bell nonlocality, the new model allows us to define and work with a mathematical description in 3-dimensional space, rather than configuration space, even in the correlated many-particle case. …

    Section 2 … the basic causally symmetric scheme is introduced in terms of initial and final boundary conditions.

    Section 3 then highlights the ways in which the corresponding initial and final wave functions will propagate.

    Section 7 indicates how backwards-in-time effects provide a meaning for the notion of negative probability.

    section 10 shows how the model explains Bell’s nonlocality in a way that is Lorentz invariant, as well as being local from a 4-dimensional point of view. 

    The generalization of the formalism to many particles is given in sections 11 and 12. A theory of measurement is outlined in section 13 for comparison with that of the standard Bohm model, then a relativistic version of the causally symmetric approach is formulated in section 14 for the single-particle Dirac case.