Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles

Ruth E. Kastner resolves 100 year-old quantum mysteries. Moreover, she explains them without explaining them away and all-the-while retains the fundamentality of the particles (as compared to the Schrodinger wave) and forces in spacetime. She calls her theory a "transactional interpretation". We'll see why in a moment. The solution proposed supposes (an inference anlogous to the status of atoms in 1850) that physical reality, the universe explored by science (particularly physics), includes something besides spacetime. She calls this Quantumland and compares it to the bulk of an iceberg which exists beneath our sight while the tip, spacetime, is only a small part of all of what is the physical universe.All quantum phenomena ("incipient transactions") happens in this bulk part of the iceberg. It has important qualities. Foremost, it is outside spacetime. Second, unlike the bulk of a real iceberg, incipient transactions are in principle invisible to observation as that is commonly understood by science. What science can observe is what makes it from an incipient transaction to a real transaction, and in that transition moves from Quantumland to spacetime. At that point, an event becomes measurable, essentially observable. This has nothing to do with whether or not it is observed by human beings. It isn't human observation that turns an incipient transaction into a real transaction but the response of absorbers to an emitter. An absorber might be a molecule in a human eye that evokes some response in human consciousness, but it might also be an atom on the surface of a rock. Our instruments are absorbers, the environment, the whole of spacetime, is filled with absorbers whose transaction-capable atoms can respond to an offer wave outside spacetime.Here's how the system works as I imperfectly understand it. Inside Quantumland there is constantly going on an exchange of virtual particles. These are "offer waves" of an emitter (say a photon or an electron), and these waves are met by corresponding "response wave" that comes from the side of every particle surrounding the emitter that can potentially absorb the particle implicit in the offer wave. Individual absorbers can only respond to a fraction of the offer wave, that fraction that the response encounters. When offer wave and response wave meet (remember this is all taking place outside spacetime) we have an "incipient transaction". The meeting sets up probabilities for any part of itself to become a real transaction. No part of the offer-response (incipient) process transfers energy. Only one of a possibly near infinite number of incipient transactions can become a real transaction and in doing so transfers a quantum of energy. The process is fundamentally random. When it happens, that event enters spacetime and we can measure it!Quantumland where virtual particles are the origin of the forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic at least) we experience in spacetime is not particularly controversial in quantum mechanics and is the main reason that physicists believe there is a quantum realm even though we cannot observe it directly. Dr. Kastner explores this origin of forces in her book as well, but her addition to the whole idea is that all of this quantum stuff takes place outside spacetime but remains a part of "the physical universe". It is a transaction's emergence into spacetime that makes it observable! Quantum physics merges into classical physics because as quantum events emerge into spacetime, one of many incipient transactions into a real transaction, energy is transferred. As these events cluster, quantum physics becomes classical physics. Kastner makes clear how each aspect of the relation between Quantumland and classical physics in spacetime result in what quantum experiments tell us. She explains action-at-a-distance, incipient transactions take place outside spacetime and are not constrained by the speed of light. But the effect cannot be used to send information faster-than-light because sending information requires actual transactions that have entered spacetime and therefore restricted to the lightspeed limit!There is even more to Kastner's book than I explore here. She spends time on the distinction between mind-as-absorber and absorbers generally, that is the physical universe, and explores a role for Quantumland in an explanation of free will. Significantly, her explanation really is an explanation. She writes beautifully for a non-mathematical audience and her analogies (many more than the iceberg) capture her concepts well. At least I thought I was with her at every step. I'm sure some of the concepts are oversimplified for the lay audience (including myself) but I think there is a genuine insight here. Excellent book if you have any interest in quantum mysteries.

I have a major conundrum here: I had to entirely reread the book after a pause for reflection to get to even the point of this review.The concern that I have-I will not call it a problem, leaving others to make that leap of judgment- is the ability to describe what the author wants to in a way that is clear. While this is a basic, and while the author is clearly much more able to do so than I could, I feel that there is something lacking here.Heaven knows, I would not even attempt to try to write such a work, assuming that I even had some claim to mastery of the material!The concern I have at heart is not what the author has tried to say. Once I reformulated her arguments, the text made sense, though it is far from proof of her postulates. This is clearly a difficulty with modern physics. Classical physics can be intuited readily with enough effort. Special Relativity can be intuited with some yet extra effort.Quantum Physics can be understood, but I will not use the word intuited here. The work here suffers from our lack of any conceptual basis for visualizing the basics of the subject readily.Don't get me wrong; this book helps.The problem is that as in Flatland by Abbott, human minds suffer the inability to visualize the concepts of things such as 4-D space, transactional offers and receptions and other described entities that have no clear reality to our minds.My problem is that English language, as well as probably all other modern languages break down in their use here. The author is limited by the vocabulary known and the denotations with which they have been imbued for decades or centuries. To understand truly requires description by words that are associated with contexts. A problem here is that Dr. Kastner has used old terms in ways that are cemented in my brain, and likely in yours, in ways that make them inherently confused.An example: 'Information"The author uses the term in quotations. She has tried to communicate unknowable, but important values that exist for Quantum Bits late in her work. The idea is that there are true values present here, unlike that in Classical Physics use of Bits. I understand now what she intended to say, but I could not do so readily. Information, as she notes, involves form in its conception. What we have in this discourse is Qubits, the Quantum Bits that have values, but not knowable, therefor in our minds they have no discernible form.We really have no true information here. We certainly have something that is information-compatible, something that hs elements in common with information, but if it cannot 'inform us' it is not information.In this case, I believe the book would have been better served by making a pause to use neologisms to the purpose. I would argue that the work can stand, but needs to be revised. I would substitute a term akin to 'hidden parameters' for information. I don't care exactly what term Dr. Kastner chooses to come up with, but 'information' as used in this context contributed to a major conceptual impediment to my understanding of the work. There were at least three other similar usages that detracted from my initial ability to come to terms with her writing. It was only after reflection that I was able to mentally repopulate her work with my own modified usages and come to some understanding of her concepts. My brain was unable to focus on what Dr. Kastner wanted to say because of how it was prepared to understand a concept rooted in a word that was pulling context in a different direction.As for the work, the limitation noted put aside, it does give a potentially valid option to String Theory and has some potential utility. Whether it will be another concept that is marginalized over time is unclear.I do hope that a second edition is created that attempts to use new terminology where old terminology has no longer fulfilled the communication value with any reasonable clarity. The improved ability of the reader to focus on the concepts without confusion will likely improve the work's palatability and acceptability.

I tried understanding QM with Leonard Susskind's book, but it has been a struggle. I don't think he does a good job - I can't understand why so many people recommend it. In contrast, I bought this book last night and it kept me awake for several hours with a sense of discovery and vertigo. Inhabitants in a two-dimensional world would be totally puzzled and mystified by the appearance and weird properties of a three-dimensional being. Similarly we would be totally puzzled and mystified if extra dimensions intersected our three-dimensional world. As I said, I just began reading this book last night, but the author hints that the weirdness of QM could be explained along similar lines. I finally understood what an operator was and why it was needed in QM. The way she explains how complex/imaginary numbers work in QM is incredible. I just hope the author knows what she is doing because this book is shaping the way I try to make sense of all these topics.

I first came across John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation (TI) in John Gribbin's 1995 book "Schrodinger's Kittens". TI appealed to me because it didn't require a conscious observer to collapse the quantum wave into an observable state. I was captivated by the visualisation of quantum "offer waves" emitted into the future eliciting "confirmation waves" echoing into the past. The meeting of offer and confirmation triggers a "transaction", a transfer of energy from emitter to absorber. This picture made the double-slit experiment (and others) easy to understand. I was impressed by Cramer's insight that some of the mathematics previously dismissed as unphysical by many physicists could in fact have real meaning.To my surprise, TI didn't really catch on; and so, more than twenty years on, we still see confusion about observer status being exploited by quantum woo-peddlars.Ruth Kastner has extended John Cramer's original TI into the relativistic domain of quantum field theory. Here she presents a clear, non-mathematical treatment of her work. I think this book would be suitable for readers of around 14 years to adult. Taking the place of mathematics are some well-chosen analogies. Removing the maths actually brings the concepts into better focus. There is also some good introductory material on philosophy. The book even touches on quantum computing.The "quantum riddles" of the book's title (solved therein) include: why the Born Rule works (here TI is clearly better than the Many Worlds interpretation); the observer problem; the microscopic vs macroscopic (quantum and classical) divide; delayed-choice experiments; the arrow of time; and more.The most radical and intriguing proposal put forward is that the very fabric of spacetime itself emerges from actualised transactions originating in the quantum realm. "Quantumland" is shown as a hidden myriad of possibilities which we cannot directly experience. Our own sensory existence in space and time can only directly experience those transactions which have become realised - never the manifold possibilities that lie under its surface. Space and time do not exist as a tableau or container for events: they are created from transactions.The Heisenberg Uncertainty inverse correlations between momentum/position (space) and energy/time are given a completely new significance. After reading the book I feel closer to bringing together several strands including conservation laws and Noether's Theorem to yield a deeper understanding.

The author doesn't believe in the Everett interpretation of quantum theory and I do. She proposes a transactional approach. I am not a physicist, but I feel her approach is very complicated.

So verstäendlich geschrieben!

Not well argued.

great book well worth reading.very informative and easy to interpert.an introduction too a whole new perspective of reality.