Dr. John Cramer

John G. Cramer is Professor Emeritus, Physics, at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, where he has had five decades of experience in teaching undergraduate and graduate level physics. He has done cutting-edge research in experimental and theoretical nuclear and ultra-relativistic heavy ion physics, including active participation in Experiments NA35 and NA49 at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, and the STAR Experiment at RHIC, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, NY. He has also worked in the foundations of quantum mechanics (QM) and is the originator of QM’s Transactional Interpretation. He served as Director of the University of Washington Nuclear Physics Laboratory from 1983 to 1990, overseeing a major $10,000,000 accelerator construction project.

John has also served on accelerator-laboratory Program Advisory Committees for LAMPF (Los Alamos National Laboratory), NSCL (Michigan State University), TRIUMF (University of British Columbia), and the 88” Cyclotron (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society (APS), was Chair of the APS/DNP Nuclear Science Resources Committee (1979–1982), and served on the APS Panel on Public Affairs (1998–2003). He presently serves on the External Council of the NIAC innovative-projects program of NASA.

 John has spent three 15-month sabbaticals in Europe, the first (1971–1972) as Bundesministerium Gastprofessor, Ludwig-Maximillian-Universität-München, Garching, Germany; then (1982–1983) as Gastprofessor, Hahn-Meitner Institut, Berlin; and finally (1994–1995) as Guest Researcher, Max-Planck Institut für Physik, München, with three months of this sabbatical spent at CERN as Experiment NA49 came into operation. He is co-author of about 300 publications in nuclear and ultra-relativistic heavy ion physics published in peer-reviewed physics journals, as well as over 141 publications in conference proceedings, and has written several chapters for multiauthor books about physics.

 John is the author of the recent nonfiction book The Quantum Handshake - Entanglement, Nonlocality and Transactions, published by Springer in 2016 and of the award-nominated hard science fiction novels Twistor and Einstein’s Bridge, both published by Avon Books. Twistor is currently available as a Dover reprint and both books are available as e-books from Book View Cafe. John is also the author of over 186 popular-level science articles published bimonthly from 1984 to present in his “The Alternate View” columns appearing in Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine and also online at https://www.npl.washington.edu/AV.

John was born in Houston, Texas on October 24, 1934, and was educated in the Houston Public Schools (Poe, Lanier, Lamar) and at Rice University, where he received a BA (1957), MA (1959), and Ph.D. (1961) in Experimental Nuclear Physics. He began his professional physics career as a Postdoc and then Assistant Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (1961–1964) before joining the Physics Faculty of the University of Washington. John and his wife Pauline live in the View Ridge neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, with their three Shetland Sheepdogs, MACH-4 Lancelot, MACH Viviane, and Taliesin.