Kathryn Cramer breaks the story on a to-be-presented Harvard talk on an experiment that appears to invalidate both the "Many Worlds" and "Copenhagen" theories of quantum mechanics. Kathryn is the daughter of John Cramer, a physicist whose "Transactional Interpretetation" hypothesis is the only one left intact by the experiment's findings.
It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.
(Thanks, Kathryn!)
