John G. Cramer

For the Australian politician, see John Cramer (Australian politician). For the television announcer, see John Cramer (entertainer).
John G. Cramer
Born John Gleason Cramer, Jr.
24 October 1934
Houston, Texas, United States
Residence Seattle, Washington and Westport, New York, United States
Citizenship United States
Nationality American
Fields Nuclear physicist, novelist
Institutions University of Washington
Alma mater Rice University
Known for Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

John G. Cramer (born October 24, 1934) is a professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, the United States. 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 prohibiting such communication.

Published works

In addition to his many scientific publications,[1] 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,[2] which is inspired from the Wheeler–Feynman Time-symmetric theory. His published novels consist of 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).[3] 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."

John was the 2010 Science Guest of Honor at Norwescon, a large science fiction and fantasy convention in the Seattle area.

Alternate View columns in Analog

See also AV Columns Online

Title Volume / Part Date Pages Subject(s)
All about teleportation 128 / 07&08 July/August 2008 128-131 Teleportation
Tracking Adolf 128 / 10 October 2008 71-73 Genetic genealogy
Humans and estimating probability 129 / 03 March 2009 59-53 Inability of most to understand probability
Radioactive decay and the Earth-Sun distance 129 / 05 May 2009 61-63 Is there a correlation?
Connecting gravity with electricity 129 / 10 October 2009 59-61 Fundamental forces
Opus 150 : dark forces in the universe 129 / 12 December 2009 35-37 Dark matter
The nice way to make a solar system 130 / 03 March 2010 60-62 Evolution of the Solar System according to the Nice model
The ice man cometh : the icy reservoirs of the Solar System 130 / 05 May 2010 59-61 Icy bodies in the Oort cloud, Kuiper belt etc.
The deficiency of black holes at the LHC 131 / 07&08 July/August 2011 84-86 Could the CERN Large Hadron Collider produce black holes?
How Al Gore and I invented the Internet 133 / 03 March 2013 67-69 'Prehistory' of the Internet (1980s)
High-Z helium : is QED failing? 133 / 05 May 2013 44-46 Quantum electrodynamics and the Standard Model
Is our world just a computer simulation? 133 / 07&08 July/August 2013 132-134 Nick Bostrom's postulation

Awards & recognition

See also

References

External links