|John Gleason Cramer, Jr.|
October 24, 1934
Houston, Texas, U.S.
|Fields||Nuclear physicist, novelist|
|Institutions||University of Washington|
|Alma mater||Rice University|
|Known for||the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mecahnics|
John G. Cramer (born 1934) is a Professor of Physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, U.S.. When not teaching, he works with the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC) detector at the new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently engaged in experiments at the University of Washington to test retrocausality by using a version of the delayed choice quantum eraser without coincidence counting. This experiment, if successful, would imply that entanglement can be used to send a signal instantaneously between two distant locations (or a message backwards in time from the apparatus to itself). Such "spooky communication" experiments have never been successfully conducted, and only attempted a limited number of times, since most physicists believe that they would violate the no-communication theorem. However, a small number of scientists (Cramer among them) believe that there is no physical law violating such communication.
In addition to his many scientific publications, John Cramer writes a regular column, "The Alternate View", for Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine; Cramer's column alternates with those of Jeffrey Kooistra. He also originated and published a paper on "The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" (TIQM) in July 1986. His published novels consist of the acclaimed Twistor (1989) and Einstein's Bridge (1997); both within the hard science fiction genre.
Cramer's simulation of the sound of the Big Bang, created using Mathematica, attracted some mainstream press attention in late 2003. The simulation originated with an "Alternate View" article, "BOOMERanG and the Sound of the Big Bang" (January 2001). Cramer describes the sound as "rather like a large jet plane 100 feet off the ground flying over your house in the middle of the night."
See also AV Columns Online
|Title||Volume / Part||Date||Pages||Subject(s)|
|All about teleportation||128 / 7&8||July/August 2008||128-131||Teleportation|
|Tracking Adolf||128 / 10||October 2008||71-73||Genetic genealogy|