John G. Cramer
John Gleason Cramer, Jr. is a Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He has been an active participant with the STAR Experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider 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 1961–63, Cramer continued as an assistant professor at the same university from 1963-64. He was an assistant professor at the University of Washington from 1964–68, an associate professor from 1968–74, 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 makes 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" 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, 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". 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 and Einstein's Bridge, 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.
Non-fiction
"Alternate View" columns in ''Analog''
| Title | Volume / part | Date | Pages | Subject |
| 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 |
| 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 |
Novels
Awards and recognition
- Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science ;
- Nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer ;
- Listed in Who's Who in America ;
- Elected Fellow, American Physical Society ;
- National Science Foundation Fellow at Rice University ;
- Sigma-Xi Thesis Award at Rice University ;
- Bausch-Lomb Science Award at Lamar High School Graduation ;
Personal life