Re: Interpreting Quantum Mechanics

Gregory L. Hansen wrote:
What's-his-name interpreted the complex conjugate as a wave going backwards in time. Interactions going both forward and backward in time negotiate a specific result. But they do so, e.g. through an entire crystal before a particular trajectory is determined, so the long-range order of a crystal determines the likelihood of particular trajectories and we still get a diffraction pattern.

I'm still trying to understand the transactional interpretation. All the explanations I've read have been along the lines of what you wrote above, and what you wrote above doesn't make sense to me. The problem is that there seems to be an implicit second dimension of time -- I can't see any other way to interpret the phrase "going backward in time", or the discussions of what happens "before" and "after" a transaction completes. If the interpretation /explicitly/ included a second dimension of time, that would be fine. But when it's only implied, I get suspicious that what's-his-name didn't notice it was there, and that the whole transaction idea isn't actually mathematically well-defined.

-- Ben
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