Is a -2 Hz wave travelling to the right the same as a 2 Hz save travelling to the right, but going backwards in time?
Could there be something to John G. Cramer's transactional interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? Instead of probability waves collapsing instantaneously, could everything be mediated by photons going backwards in time?
"Is a -2 Hz wave travelling to the right the same as a 2 Hz save travelling to the right, but going backwards in time?"
Yes, all other things being equal. It's a bit less confusing if you leave the signs off and just say that "a wave travelling to the right at f in t is the same as a wave travelling to the left at f in -t.
This is also very much in the "spherical cow" sense of physics - it's true of many ideal cases on chalkboards, but it gets fuzzy in practice due to thermodynamics and other nonidealities. Plus, you can only observe things from the perspective of time moving forwards.
"Could there be something to John G. Cramer's transactional interpretation of Quantum Mechanics?"
There's nothing I'm aware of which is implicitly wrong with a transactional interpretation - you just have no way to empirically prove that it's a valid "why." In physics, we are very often limited to "how" and "what."
It looks to have some ideas in common with Feynman's reaction diagrams and path integrals, so it may be an interesting approach if you're partial to those. The catch is that wavefunction collapse is equally true: it's a model which makes accurate predictions about observable experimental outcomes.
They found a solution with a negative w and negative k, so it travels forward. They "neglect" the solutions that travel backward (with negative w and positive k, or positive w and negative k). The more clear parts about this is the Fig 1(a) (page 2) and the paragraph below it.
The problem with such interpretations is that they violate causality.
Check out Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory for history.
Concepts such as collapse of a wave function aren't necessary when you stop treating the observer in a special way and start considering observer-particle as a big quantum system.
Could there be something to John G. Cramer's transactional interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? Instead of probability waves collapsing instantaneously, could everything be mediated by photons going backwards in time?