The 2nd edition of my 2012 book The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge University Press) will be coming out in June, 2022. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 8, on the emergence of spacetime in the transactional picture. Comments welcome!
Sneak Peek at Chapter 8 of my forthcoming 2nd Edition
Published
Transactional Interpretation 
The irreflexivity condition on page 3 did not render correctly in my PDF
Thank you. I’ll see if I can fix this.
In the new chapter 8 it is stated that the quantum state remains in “quantumland” after transactions, and what makes the fabric of space-time are “events”. The quantumstate indeed must live on, if further transactions should be possible, but isn’t there an update, or collapse by a transaction, which makes a physical system manifest in space-time? I am missing this point in the new description.
Andreas Schlatter
Hi Andreas. Regarding rest-mass systems (emitters and absorbers): there is indeed an update in the system’s state, as indicated in Figure 2 and the discussion above it. But as shown in Figure 2, the system itself remains in the quantum substratum. The ‘spacetime fabric’ consists only of transferred real photons and their endpoints–emissions and absorptions– which can be tagged as spacetime events. This of course is a radical departure from the usual idea that all physical systems are in spacetime as a sort of background or container. According to RTI, spacetime is an emergent construct, and actually that is consistent with the fact that the gravitational field (as the metrical structure of spacetime) is sourced by matter. A field is always outside its source; field sources are not ‘inside’ the fields they create, even though of course they are affected by them. See the Conclusion in which I discuss this point.
Hi! Any update on when the 2nd edition will be released? Eagerly anticipating it!
Thanks Robert! There were some delays in getting it into production, but things are moving now. I’m hoping it will be out late this fall, but it’s possible it might slip to next year. Will update this site as soon as I get an estimated date!