John G. Cramer

For the Australian politician, see John Cramer (Australian politician). For the television announcer, see John Cramer (entertainer).

John G. Cramer
Cramer in 2012
Born	John Gleason Cramer, Jr. (1934-10-24) 24 October 1934 Houston, Texas, United States
Nationality	American
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Rice University
Known for	Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the novels Twistor and Einstein's Bridge, Member, External Council of NIAC/NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Activity
Spouse	Pauline Cramer
Children	Kathryn Cramer
Scientific career
Fields	Nuclear physicist, Quantum physics, Ultra-relativistic heavy ion physics, HBT interferometry, novelist, popular science writer
Institutions	University of Washington
Doctoral advisor	Calvin M. Class
Website	John Cramer's Home Page

John Gleason Cramer, Jr. (born October 24, 1934) is a Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, known for his development of the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. He has been an active participant with the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC) Experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Early years

John Cramer was born in Houston, Texas. He attended Mirabeau B Lamar High School in Houston, and graduated with a BA in Physics from Rice University in 1957. He continued his studies, graduating with an MA in Physics from Rice University in 1959 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Rice University in 1961.

Career

After serving as a post-doctoral fellow at Indiana University from 1961 to 1963, Cramer continued as an assistant professor at the same university from 1963 to 1964. He was an assistant professor at the University of Washington from 1964 to 1968, an associate professor from 1968 to 1974, and was appointed as a full professor in 1974.

From 2007 to 2014, Cramer investigated the possibility that quantum nonlocality might be used for communication between observers through the use of switchable interference patterns. In the course of this work, he gained new understanding of the "show stopper" within the quantum formalism that prevents such nonlocal signaling: For each interference pattern, nature also provides and superimposes an "anti-interference pattern". These are always combined in a way that "erases" potential nonlocal signals. The two interference patterns complement each other, resulting in no perceptible interference pattern. Measurement changes can dramatically modify the individual interference patterns, but always so that this erasure occurs. In this way, nature is protected from the possibility of retrocausal signaling and its consequences and paradoxes.

Cramer has been making regular appearances on the Science Channel and on NPR Science Friday.

Writing

In addition to his approximately 300 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, John Cramer writes a regular column, "The Alternate View", appearing in every second issue, for Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. He also originated and published a paper on "The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" (TIQM) in July 1986, which was inspired from the Wheeler-Feynman Time-symmetric theory.

His book on quantum mechanics, The Quantum Handshake: Entanglement, Nonlocality and Transactions (2015), published by Springer Verlag, is a comprehensive introduction to the transactional interpretation.

Cramer's simulation of the sound of the Big Bang, created using Mathematica, attracted some mainstream press attention in late 2003 and again in 2013. 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."

Cramer has published two novels, Twistor (1989) and Einstein's Bridge (1997), both within the hard science fiction genre. Cramer was the 2010 Science Guest of Honor at Norwescon, a large science fiction and fantasy convention in the Seattle area.

Bibliography

Non-fiction

• The quantum handshake : entanglement, nonlocality and transactions. New York: Springer. 2015.

"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
Planck : "Big Bang" sound in high fidelity	133 / 10	October 2013	51–53	Planck satellite mission
The 2013 Starship Century Symposium	133 / 12	December 2013	75–77	Starship Century Symposium, May 21–22, 2013, UCSD
When WIMPs collide	134 / 05	May 2014	50–52	Weakly interacting massive particles
Inflation and the swirls of gravity	134 / 10	October 2014	58–60	Gravitational waves
Hacking the genome alphabet	134 / 12	December 2014	63–65	Expansion of genome alphabet letters from four to six
Weighing the neutrino with cyclotron radiation	135 / 03	March 2015	64–66	Project 8 Collaboration
The specifications of extraterrestrial intelligence	135 / 05	May 2015	76–78	Edward O. Wilson's The meaning of human existence
Galactic Death Stars and Extinction Events	135 /07&08	July/August 2015	119–121	Gamma ray bursts
The Retarding of Science	135 / 10	October 2015	60–63	2015 Gold–Plated AARSE Awards

Novels

• Twistor. New York: Morrow. 1989.
• Einstein's bridge. New York: Avon Books. 1997.
• Twistor. Introduction by Gene Wolfe (Dover paperback ed.). Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. 2016 [1989].{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)

Awards and recognition

• Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (1991);
• Nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (1991);
• Listed in Who's Who in America (from 43rd Edition, 1984);
• Elected Fellow, American Physical Society (1974);
• National Science Foundation Fellow at Rice University (1959–61);
• Sigma-Xi Thesis Award at Rice University (1959);
• Bausch-Lomb Science Award at Lamar High School Graduation (1953);

Personal life

Cramer married Pauline Ruth Bond in June, 1961. The couple have three children: Kathryn Cramer (born April, 1962), John G. Cramer III (born January 1964), and Karen Cramer (born April 1967).

See also

• Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
• Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory

References

• Profile in Marquis Who's Who on the Web.

External links

• John G. Cramer's Home Page – Includes a photograph of the author, contact information, and more
• A Puzzling Signal in RHIC Experiments, Physics News Update Number 723 #2, March 15, 2005 by Phil Schewe & Ben Stein.
• John G. Cramer at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Scientific publications of John G. Cramer on INSPIRE-HEP
• John G. Cramer, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Washington, presents "The Quantum Handshake Explored." YouTube video dated 1 Feb 2018.