FTL Signaling Made Easy

Demetrios Kalamidas: Prove me wrong or turn in your PhDs

When I was getting my undergraduate degree at Ohio State University, physics and math classes took up a lot of my time. But when preposterous claims were brought to our attention, me and my friends always seemed to find time to check them out. Two such claims stand out in my memory. The first was a curious explanation for why trees can grow taller than 30 ft. If trees raise water by pulling a vacuum by evaporating water from their leaves, then atmospheric pressure (15 lbs/square inch) is insufficient to push a column of water higher than thirty feet. Yet outside my door there are redwoods effortlessly growing to five times that height. The explanation offered to "explain trees" was that thin water columns could support "negative" pressure and hence surpass the "natural limit to growth". This could be checked by trying to lift a mercury column to a greater height than 760 mm by placing water on top of the mercury and evaporating it thru a sintered-glass funnel. We had all these thing in the physics lab, so a few of us built an "artificial tree" and were surprised to see that after a few days of evaporization, the mercury column was indeed much higher than the "natural limit" suggested by  naive arguments based on air pressure.

At about the same time Edmund Land, the inventor of polaroid film and the Polaroid camera, announced that he could produce full-color images with only two colors rather than the three colors required by the conventional models of color vision. Land had his best results with the color yellow and white. So, following Land's recipe, we made black and white transparencies thru the appropriate filters, then projected these two negatives thru two slide projectors one of whose lenses we covered with a yellow filter. And sure enough we found that, contrary to received belief, yellow and white light could produce blue, green and red sensations on our retinas. The colors were not faithful, but, by Zeus they were there!

That was in the 50s at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

A few years ago I was talking to a physics professor at a California university, which shall remain unnamed, about a preposterous parapsychology experiment called "autonomic presentiment" and wondered if any of the students in his school had tried to reproduce its results which seemed to show that certain physiological measures such as skin resistance or heart beat changed a few seconds before an emotional picture appeared on a computer but not when a calm picture appeared. Surely someone in the psychology department or the physics department would possess the intellectual curiosity, I guessed, to check out these preposterous claims.

"Intellectual curiosity?" my friend replied. "What's that? The only thing these students are looking for are good jobs."

Recently another preposterous claim appeared on the physics radar and attracted my attention. Demetrios Kalamidas, who graduated from CCNY and worked in laser labs, came up with a faster-than-light signaling scheme based on quantum optics. Kalamidas's scheme passed peer review and was published in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America B (an arXiv preprint is available here.) His proposal was received with a deafening silence.

Since I have some experience with FTL signaling schemes, I supposed that I could easily refute the Kalamidas proposal. I devised my own version of his scheme and after some effort was able to establish that (my version of the) Kalamidas scheme would not work. So far so good.

Armed with this comforting result, I reformulated the original Kalamidas scheme using my own notation and confidently proceeded to disprove it--without success. In fact I actually discovered a way to improve Kalamidas's scheme that raises his original fringe visibility from 9% to 22%. My paper (with the new improved FTL signaling scheme) is available here.

The Kalamidas experiment uses hardware found in every modern optics lab and every process Kalamidas cites has been achieved tho never in the combination he envisions. However before any hardware is actually assembled to test his claims, it is important to remember that a thought experiment is less expensive than a real experiment. And the conceptual elements needed to test Kalamidas's scheme inside the mind are available to most every physics graduate student, are openly published in every modern optics book and are present in extremely high concentration in the minds of hundreds of scientists working in modern optics labs around the world.

But months have gone by without a peep from the professionals.

The Kalamidas scheme is begging to be refuted. And thousands of people exist who are intellectually over-equipped to do so. But, if my unnamed professor of physics is right, then Demetrios Kalamidas need not worry. The one factor today's generation of physicists seems to be missing is this: sheer intellectual curiosity.

Prove me wrong, punk. Make my day.

Equations of Power

Equations of Power Exiled-in-America Press 2013

The alchemists and old magicians believed that certain words and symbols had power over nature. And in their secret books they inscribed runes, spells, charms which when spoken aloud in the proper circumstances could influence both matter and mind.

Today's scientists also possess (not-so-secret) books written in the special language of mathematics. The spells and charms in these books exert their power not by being spoken aloud but by providing detailed maps of the physical world that can take us places we would otherwise never be able to go.

The "magic" of modern physics resides in a few basic equations which are usually confined to scientific circles. Now psychobotanist Dale Pendell breaks these equations out of their scientific contexts and turns them into verse. Pendell is best known for his Pharmako Trilogy, a deep and original study of mind-altering plant-based substances from coffee, thru cannabis, to Ecstasy and LSD. His work includes a novel The Great Bay, a book about Burning Man (Inspired Madness) and several other books and essays some of which can be found on his website.  Pendell has a clear and distinctive poetic voice which has been likened to William Blake, Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers.

The big stars of Equations of Power are Schrödinger's and Maxwell's equations from physics. But Pendell's widely cast net also hauls up the chemistry of gunpowder (The Fire Drug) and of bronze (The Bronze Sword), the natural forces that form serpentine rock and the nautilus shell, nuclear physics, the equivalence of energy and mass and Consciousness Explained. Here are some excerpts from Pendell's new book plus the short poem The Wave Collapse, in which Pendell ponders the central mystery of quantum theory--how do quantum possibility waves "collapse" to form the world's actual facts?

Schrödinger's Wave Equation

...

Erwin Schrödinger spent the night

in adulterous fornication

with his mistress.

By morning he was thinking

about waves

...

Wave being wife, or,

on that night, close enough,

the good physicist assumed 

that the energy of the whole thing

was conserved--that a push here

created an equal and opposite

pull there.

...

The Fire Drug

...

The violence of the mixture was noted--

some burned faces and a burned-down house.

It took another century or two of experiment,

continually increasing the proportion of nitre--

it seemed impossible to add too much.

At three-quarters, the mixture exploded.

This was new.  They called it huo yao: the fire-drug,

In a bamboo tube, fire shot from the end--

they were strapped to the tips of spears,

launched as rockets, or sealed as bombs.

...

The Wave Collapse

On the beach where I grew up

     long shore break--

the huge combers breaking

     all at once--

sometime with

     a loud crack

the water

     pulled and stretched

the hollow tube like a

     tunnel of light

barely a foot of water, the

     sand sucked skyward

for one extended and suspended

     moment, different

from the crash of the water

     against the beach sand,

which, at night,

     would shake the house.

One wonders

     how chlorophyll

can be so quiet

     snatching fire

from the sun.

Dale Pendell, the psychobotany guy

Seven Reconfigured Sacraments

Et introibo ad altare Dei.

SEVEN RECONFIGURED SACRAMENTS

1. The Sacrament of Reality
There is no God but Unnamable Mystery;
Any other god is nothing before This.

2. The Sacrament of Baptism
When I first realized
That I was going to die.

3. The Sacrament of Confirmation
The times I recognize
Another of my tribe.

4. The Sacrament of Confession
I did it
And I'm glad.

5. The Sacrament of Thankfulness
This impulse of gratitude
For the complex living paradox
Of my own existence
And the existence of everything else.

And for wonderful companions.

6. The Sacrament of Communion
The times I spent
Alone and naked
With one of the opposite sex.
And everything that came from this.

7. The Sacrament of Love
I will love the Unnamable Mystery
And all of Her lesser Mysteries.
With my whole heart
I will love every part.

Nick Gets a Spiral CAT Scan

Nick after release from Dominican Hospital

The Friday before Good Friday 2013, I was bringing up my laundry from under the deck, a vertical distance of less than 30 feet, when suddenly I felt like I was back on Mt Shasta--I could hardly breathe, and my heart was racing. I put down the laundry and rested. Back to normal, I did what anyone else would do--I hoped it would just go away. But it didn't. So I decided to see my doctor a few days later on Monday. He checked me out, advised a few blood tests and chest X-ray in Santa Cruz. I returned in the evening from Santa Cruz to my doctor's phone message (he had received the blood results) to call him immediately. I decided to wait till morning but in his second phone call he advised me in person to go to Dominican Hospital immediately. I called my friend Reno who drove me (about 10 PM Monday) to the Emergency Room at Dominican.

We signed in. And waited. And waited. Due to the large numbers of Americans who lack Health Insurance, all hospital Emergency Rooms in the USA have become doctor's offices of last resort. And consequently Dominican Hospital's ER is not a swift emergency treatment center but a de facto doctor's waiting room.

Reno and I waited some more and finally (around midnight) were instructed to fill out forms and wait some more--this time inside a large room to which nurses and doctors had access. I was tagged with an orange wrist band with name, number and bar code. A nurse's aide arrived with a machine on wheels to take my "vital signs"--blood pressure, pulse rate, temperature and blood-oxygen level. As long as I stayed at the hospital, I could count on some woman with a vital-signs cart arriving every few hours to take these measurements. The numbers showed up on her cart in great big digital displays. I noticed that my blood pressure was unusually high, mostly I guessed, because I was scared because I didn't yet know "what was wrong" with me.

Nick wrist-tagged at Space Station Dominic

Now it was early Tuesday morning, in a dimly lit room somewhere in the bowels of Dominican hospital. Except for my birth and a few outpatient experiences, I have never spent time as a patient inside a hospital so I decided to open my sensors and pay attention.

The first thing I noticed was that no one wore uniforms. The doctors, nurses and nurse's aides wore clothes that ranged from somewhat glamorous, to causal, to individualized, veri-colored, fashion-trimmed variations on traditional nurse's uniforms. The only white lab coats I saw at Dominican were worn by the men and women in the pharmacies.

Everyone seemed to be wearing clothes of their choice. But the official people were separated from the patients by the cluster of security cards they wore pinned to their bodies. These costumes reminded me of my times in physics labs like Los Alamos where the staff wore whatever they pleased but everyone without exception wore some sort of photo ID. I felt right at home (at the St. Dominic's Linear Accelerator Center). The only difference was that at St Dominic's, there were more women with badges than at Los Alamos.

Because of my symptoms and blood results, the docs had scheduled me for a Spiral CAT scan of my lungs. But that required a lot of waiting in the basement of the "accelerator center." Now it was long after midnight, and the "night people" began to emerge from their warrens. A nurse wearing a tight black gown, flashy jewelry and a surgical mask stopped by to chat with us waiters. My vitals were taken again as well as some blood samples.

More nurses in different outfits (one an intern, working for zero$$ on a 12-hour shift) arrived and prepared me for the CAT scan. This involved fitting my right arm with an IV shunt through which various liquids could be conveniently inserted into Nick's circulatory system.

We waited some more. Finally (around 3AM) I was loaded onto a gurney, shot up thru my IV shunt with an X-ray contrast liquid (probably sodium iodide) and wheeled into the CAT scan room.

Which looked like something out of Star Trek--a white doughnut-shaped ring (made by Siemens) into which my body was transported on a motor-driven bed. The entire scan took only a few minutes.

The results came just as fast but I was returned to the dim-lit waiting room to await a doctor who was qualified to interpret the scan. When Doctor "Matthew" finally arrived, Reno and I asked to see the pictures. They showed up on a gigantic screen but were indeed as incomprehensible to a layman as the pictures from a particle accelerator.

My stay at Dominican taught me the meaning of two new medical terms--"thrombosis" and "embolism". "Thrombosis" means the formation of a blood clot. And "embolism" means "blockage",
from the Greek word for "insertion". Nick's Spiral CAT scan showed that he had a blood clot (thrombus) in his lungs--a condition known as PE (pulmonary embolism).

But not just one clot. Dr Matthew used the word "bilateral" which means I had at least one clot in each lung. When we looked at the scan, Dr Matthew pointed out some of the embolisms on that cross-section, then shifted to another cross-section and pointed out other embolisms. "What about this?" I asked, pointing to a gray part of the picture. "O yes, that's an embolism too." Reno used the term "shotgun" to describe his layman's impression of the condition of my lungs.

On the basis of this CAT scan image, Dr Matthew admitted me to Dominican Hospital for further observation. And Reno left to catch a few hours sleep before he had to to get up and take his son to school.

Map of human circulatory system

After Reno left,  I waited for awhile until I was assigned a room (1222) in a part of the hospital called "the Overflow". I was wheeled to my room but by now it was dawn and the hospital was going into day shift.

Nick's diagnosis was Pulmonary Embolism (PE). Somewhere in my body, blood clots (thombi) had formed, and were carried to my lungs (see "pulmonary arteries" above) where they were forming blockages (embolisms) to my normal breathing. Barring drastic measures, these embolisms could not be removed. However my body's normal processes, over a time scale of several months, would remove them naturally.

The obvious next step was to determine the source (or sources) of the blood clots. The usual suspects are wounds to the lower legs.

Before I had had a chance to sleep, I was probed by a new series of Star-Trek-like machines. Wheeled into a room where an enthusiastic redhead named "Melody", applied a combination of ultrasound and deep Esalen massage to my bare legs. She would locate a vein on her imaging device, then press down till that image disappeared. If the vein's image failed to disappear no matter how hard she pushed, then the probable cause was the presence of a blood clot inside the vein. The best part was that I could watch all this on the screen while it was happening. Melody conscientiously probed both my legs with her sonic massage tool but found only one blood clot--inside my left knee. She and her machine found no probable cause for my bilateral pulmonary embolisms.

Back in Room 1222, I was given "blood thinners" both oral (xarelto?) and via shots in my stomach (lovenox?) to prevent the further formation of clots. Six electrodes were placed on my chest and hooked via an electrode harness to a heart-lung monitor over my bed which was in turn linked to the nurse's station in Overflow. Suffering from lack of sleep, isolated in an unfamiliar, high-tech couch, hooked to an electro-sensing machine, I felt (except for the high gravity and good air) that I was floating inside Space Station Dominic high above the Earth.

After breakfast (pancakes and bacon), a nice dark-haired lady arrived with an echo-cardiogram machine. With this device we both could see into my living heart (!!!). From many angles. I was fascinated. On the screen of nice lady's echo machine, my heart looked less like the pictures in an anatomy book, and more like the cross-section of some intricate marine creature pulsing with the rhythm of the sea. Via this method of imaging, my heart did not appear tough and robust, but delicate and vulnerable, able to be swept away at any moment into the depths.

After viewing my heart from many directions, both in black-and-white and color (Doppler-imaging), the echo tech informed me that she found no serious abnormalities. Most notably she saw no blood clots inside the little sea creature that moves Nick's blood.

I spent the rest of the day (Tuesday) having blood drawn and vital signs taken, being interviewed by a doctor from India and finally getting my first night's sleep in two days.

After breakfast (omelet) and more tests of blood and vitals, I was visited by a nurse's aide around noon who tested my vital signs while we briskly walked the hospital's halls. This test suggested that despite my embolisms I could function normally without stressing my system. Later that day I was given a prescription for a blood thinner (xarelto by Bayer) and discharged around 6 PM.

Although I was happy to exit Space Station Dominic, I was pleased with the careful attention of the staff and their cheerful and friendly attitude under stressful conditions. In my haste to get back home as soon as possible I neglected to obtain a copy of my CAT scan. Instead I am posting an image from a website that publishes nothing but pictures of cats cavorting on flat-bed scanners.

From "thecatscan.tumblr.com"

Quantum Theology

The Holy Trinity: Three Persons in One God

The early Catholic church taught that there were two paths to discovering the Nature of God--Revelation and the study of nature. Revelation includes the teachings of the church itself which include such mysteries as the Holy Trinity--the notion that God (Deus) was one being consisting of three separate Persons: Father (Pater), Son (Filius) and Holy Spirit (Spiritus). The figure above, which appears in most Catholic catechisms, declares that the Father is not (non est) the Son, and the Son is not (non est) the Spirit. But both the Son and the Father are (est) God. Various analogies have been used to illustrate this Mystery, from the union of three candle flames to Saint Patrick holding up a shamrock. When I went to school I was told that the Trinity was a mystery no human could understand-- an intellectual tactic similar to the popular "shut up and calculate" "explanation" of Quantum Reality.

Revelation also includes the direct experience of God by individual mystics. But this Path was not encouraged by the Church both because it threatened the Church's teaching monopoly and because such personal revelations could be contaminated by human frailties and desires. Although I spent four years studying theology and other topics at a Catholic prep school, we never once discussed the revelations of any mystic. However in the St Charles Borromeo library I discovered the classic mystical text "Dark Night of the Soul" by St John of the Cross. After reading this book cover to cover, I decided that if this was what it meant to be a mystic, then mysticism was not for Nick. Much later in life I experimented with psychedelics--following Blessed Terence McKenna's dictum: "Now even bad people can see God."--and directly experienced many of the paradoxes of consciousness that up till then I had only read about. Not only are the mysteries of Body, Mind and God intellectually complex, I concluded, they are often flat-out terrifying.

The second Path to God is through the study of the world. If God indeed created everything like an artist creates a painting, song or sculpture, then one might hope to learn about the psychology of the artist by looking as deeply as possible at the details of that artist's work--an endeavor called Natural Theology. Albert Einstein when he said: "I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon. I want to know God's thoughts--the rest are mere details." was speaking as a Natural Theologian.

Today the practice of Natural Theology has taken a peculiar turn. Physicists have discovered the Secret of the Universe. We now possess the equations that accurately predict the results of every phenomenon we are able to observe in the laboratory--equations that are only beginning to change our world through classically-impossible new technologies such as lasers and computer chips. The Secret of the Universe is called Quantum Theory which gives us unprecedented control of the Quantum Facts. However the price physicists pay for this triumph is steep--we must give up Quantum Reality. We are no longer able to tell a plausible story about WHAT IS HAPPENING when a Quantum Fact appears. And the world we see is made of nothing but Quantum Facts. Werner Heisenberg expressed this awkward situation thus: "Our conception of the objective reality of elementary particles has evaporated in a curious way--not into the fog of some new, obscure or not yet understood reality concept but into the transparent clarity of a new mathematics."

When I was eight years old, I was initiated into another way to experience God--by taking Him directly into my body--by swallowing at Mass a piece of bread whose "substance" had been changed by the words of the priest into the substance of God. This Church explained this miracle in terms of a Medieval physics in which all matter consists of an invisible "substance" to which are attached visible and palpable "accidents"--accidents such as "white, thin, two inches around, etc". When the priest says his magic words the bread's accidents remain the same but the bread's invisible substance is changed into the substance of God--hence the term "transubstantiation" that refers to the physics of the Eucharist.

Priest in Philadelphia turning bread into the Body of God

What an odd concept, that God might not dwell in a far-away heaven, but might take residence in a piece of bread. And bending the doctrine a bit, God might not just invisibly inhabit the substance of the consecrated Host, but the substance of all matter, however lowly. God, or some aspect of God, might be invisibly present beneath everything. God, or some foretaste of God, might be teasing us by appearing to physicists as Quantum Reality.


If it's God who's running the quantum theater, He/She certainly behaves like a showoff. Almost every sort of contradiction we can think of, God (or nature) effortlessly combines without anything exploding. The quantum world is both analog and digital, both fully deterministic and utterly random, combines both wave and particle in a single phenomenon. And lately God's showing off Her chops in the hot new arena of quantum entanglement. If you're keen to explore the quantum entanglement chapter of Natural Theology, then get thee to a modern optics lab.

Quantum optics experiment: Can the bizarre behavior of light reveal the hidden nature of God?

One of the most beautiful examples of quantum entanglement is the GHZ experiment--named after three physicists, Goldberger, Horne and Zeilinger. In the GHZ setup three photons A, B, and C are emitted from a common source (labeled GHZ in the picture below). These photons travel in three different directions (oriented somewhat like a Mercedes symbol) to three distant lab stations where Alice, Bob and Charlie are prepared to measure the spin direction of their particular A, B or C photon. This being quantum mechanics, Alice cannot just "measure" the pre-existing spin of her A photon. Alice must chose a direction and the photon will respond with spin pointing entirely along that direction ("spin-up") or entirely opposite that direction ("spin-down"). Although before being measured, Alice's photon could have pointed in any direction on a sphere (an analog quantity), Alice's action forces that photon to make a digital choice. The Quantum Reality dilemma consists of the fact that although we can perfectly predict the results of the GHZ experiment, we are unable to formulate a plausible story about WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING at Alice's photon detector. We are equally ignorant about WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING at all photon detectors anywhere in the Universe including the photon detectors in your eyes that make it possible for you to read this page.

A photon is said to be in a spin "eigenstate" if there is a direction Alice can choose where that photon will register spin-up 100% of the time. When a photon is in a eigenstate, it makes sense to say that photon A is spinning in a definite direction. It is easy to put photons in spin eigenstates. A pair of polarized sunglasses can do the job.

However the three GHZ photons are not produced in eigenstates but in a state of spin entanglement. "Quantum Entanglement" is impossible to describe in classical terms. The three GHZ photon no longer possess the property "spin" on their own. The only entity that possesses a definite spin is the entire three-photon system all at once. Thus photon A is "not spinning", photon B is "not spinning",
photon C is "not spinning". But the system as a whole has a definite spin. The GHZ arrangement bears a vague resemblance to the mystery of the Holy Trinity--it's completely incomprehensible to the human mind, what nature is doing with these three photons. However the GHZ mystery differs from the mystery of the Trinity in that the GHZ mystery is not just words in a book--it's the sort of thing that ordinary light does every day. Today's physicists are only at the beginning of our exploration of Quantum Reality. Likewise today's natural theologians have only begun to appreciate the handiwork of the Universe's inhumanly eccentric artist.

At the beginning of the 21st Century, our knowledge of matter is deep and sophisticated--our knowledge of mind and of God shallow and primitive. When experiments and theories about mind, when experiments and theories about God begin to match the sophistication of our experiments and theories about matter, only then will we be able to enjoy the fruits of a true quantum theology.

QUANTUM THEOLOGY

Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and Jew,
Bacterium, bobcat, skunk, kangaroo,
Photon, electron, spins even and odd
Is what lies under this the Substance of God?

Most old-fashioned concepts of God 
were not so astute--
Story-book Yahwehs and Wotans 
for Richard Dawkins to refute.
Now science has shown us that Nature deep down
Turns human ideas of reason and logic around.

If Quantum Reality gives us glimpse of Divine
Then Her everyday acts defy human design.
Each quantum event in the Universe grand
Hides a magnificent miracle we don't understand.

Holy Trinity is kid's play compared to GHZ
A common ho-hum triple-photon mystery.
If Nature works marvels in stuff deaf and blind
How is She handling the Mystery of Mind?

Perhaps God's not a Goon who holds all the Aces
But a mystery inside our most intimate places.
Maybe Her Mind & yours are as close as a shave
Mad, goofy-entangled--like particle/wave.

The GHZ experiment: Three photons in one entanglement

The Kalamidas Experiment

Nick calculating the Kalamidas effect (NKE)

Recently Demetrios Kalamidas, a young New York quantum-optics physicist, proposed an imaginative new superluminal signaling scheme--OKE (see also KISS and Demetrios! the Opera). The Kalamidas experiment proposes for Bob to send instant signals to Alice via the medium of a pair of path-entangled photons (A and B).

When Bob knows (from observation of his photon B) which path Alice's A photon took, then Alice cannot observe two-path interference. But if Bob can erase which-path information then, in principle, Alice can get her path-uncertain photon to interfere with itself.

Switching between these two options (knowledge of Alice's photon's path and erasure of that knowledge) Bob can instantly send a signal to Alice no matter how large the distance that separates them. So goes the argument for FTL signaling via quantum entanglement.

In my analysis of the Kalamidas experiment: NKE (caution: 2-MB pdf download), I consider three possible choices that Bob could make to either obtain or erase which-path info concerning Alice's photon A.

I call these three choices: 1. the Fock Choice; 2. the Frost choice and 3. the Kalamidas choice. The Fock choice preserves which-path info and both the Frost choice and the Kalamidas choice erase which-path info—but in two different ways.

The Frost-choice method for quantum-erasure of which-path info is well-known—scramble Bob's two paths in a beam splitter. This choice does indeed lead to interference of Alice's photons. But this interference is INVISIBLE because it is superposed with an exactly complementary anti-interference pattern, the sum of which produces a completely random signal at Alice's detectors. These two patterns (signal and anti-signal) can however be separated by a coincidence trigger from Bob that tells Alice which of Bob's two detectors fired. If detector B1 went off then Alice sees a signal; if detector B2 went off, then Alice sees an anti-signal.

So (making the Frost choice) Bob's erasure of which-path info does indeed produce interference at Alice's detectors but ALICE'S INTERFERENCE IS ENCRYPTED using a random key that Bob can only send by conventional slower-than-light methods. Hence the Frost choice fails as a superluminal signaling device.

What about the Kalamidas choice?

The gist of the Kalamidas experiment is the novel method he has invented for Bob to quantum-erase which-path info. In his original article: OKE = Original Kalamidas Experiment, Kalamidas demonstrates that his method leads to UNENCRYPTED INTERFERENCE at Alice's detectors. Hence it appears that Demetrios Kalamidas has devised a viable mechanism for sending signals faster-than-light. Furthermore all of the components of the Kalamidas device are available in most modern quantum-optics labs. No exotic processes needed—everything in principle is completely understood.

For his FTL machine, Kalamidas employs an unusual method for which-path erasure. Bob "ambiguifies"  the number of photons in each of his two paths by mixing each photon (which is normally in a "Fock state" of definite photon number—either zero or one) with a state of uncertain photon number. In Kalamidas's original paper (OKE), he used for this number-uncertain state a truncated coherent state. In Nick's version of the Kalamidas experiment (NKE), I use a state |U> = x|0> + y|1> (which I call "gray light") as my number-uncertain input.

The beam-splitter math for the NKE experiment is simple but tedious—30 terms that must be carefully squared, added together and matched correctly with the right output detectors. The first time I carried out this calculation, I verified Kalamidas's claim: Bob, by his choice of what to measure could seemingly cause: 1. nothing to happen at Alice's detectors or 2. unencrypted interference to happen at Alice's detectors with a very large amplitude (when gray light parameters were maximized) of 25%.

I was happy to see this result. Not because I believed that I had verified FTL signaling. But because I believed that I had created a paradox (the Kalamidas-Herbert paradox?) which would be resolved in some clever way that might teach us something new about the subtleties of few-photon quantum physics.

I sent my results to Demetrios, who scrutinized them with a critical eye, eventually discovering a simple conceptual error that I had missed over and over again. It's easy to overlook your own mistakes—another good reason for peer review in science.

Correcting my mistake I recalculated and obtained Bob-induced interference at Alice's detectors. But this correctly calculated interference was completely encrypted—only visible (like the Frost choice) if Bob sends a coincidence-triggered decryption signal to Alice at slower-than-light speeds.

My conclusion?

(Quoted from NKE): I wish to congratulate Demetrios Kalamidas for coming up with his imaginative new FTL scheme which gave me much pleasure and excitement to analyze. I would also like to thank him for correcting an error in my work which, up until his intervention, seemed to show confirmation of his FTL signaling claim. After his timely input, the present (presumably correct) calculation demonstrates a complete refutation of any FTL effect. However, the Kalamidas scheme of erasing which-path info by mixing Fock light with gray light is clever and may yet find new technical applications in areas other than superluminal communication technology.

Sketch of the original Kalamidas experiment (OKE)

Demetrios! the Opera

Bruce Damer auditioning for Demetrios! the Opera

DEMETRIOS! THE OPERA

Mama, Mama, Mama:
Photonic entanglement
O Mama mia:
Faster than light.

Mama, Mama, Mama:
Gray light's the Secret.
O Mama mia:
Could Einstein be right?

Will we go back in time
When his theory's been tested?
Can we mix Gray light and Fock
Without being arrested?

Has he found the white light
At the end of the trail?
Is Demetrios the knight
Who's discovered the Grail?

Changing our history
Could really be risky:
Is this how the story 
Of humankind ends?

One touch with the past
Might well be our last: 
Adios, homo sapiens. 

One touch with the past 
Might well be our last: 
Adios, homo sapiens.

TWO VALENTINES

Nick's Knot by August O'Connor

TWO VALENTINES


OM'S LAW

My best teachers
have been those
who produced the greatest amperage
with the barest minimum
of voltage.


VALENTINE 2013

You're just like every other woman:
pretending to give me
only what you think
I might be looking for.

I'm sorry, honey.
I wasn't paying attention.
Thank you
For all your complex surprises.

KISS -- a New Superluminal Communication Scheme

Demetrios A. Kalamidas

The phenomenon of quantum entanglement is truly bizarre. Two quantum particles (photons, electrons, atoms, for instance) that have once interacted seem in theory to behave as a single entity. No matter how distant their separation, an action on one seems (again only in the theory) to instantly affect the state of its distant partner -- which suggests that entangled particles can communicate faster than light. However no experiment with entangled particles has ever revealed a human-usable superluminal connection. Furthermore, using the very theory that describes entanglement, one can prove (in agreement with all current experiments) that superluminal signaling is impossible. However any impossibility proof is only as good as the assumptions that go into it. One can easily imagine that an ingenious way of making a quantum measurement might be discovered that evades the assumptions underlying these proofs, hence opening the door to a practical faster-than-light signaling scheme.

Recently Demetrios Kalamidas, who has a degree from CCNY and is currently working at New York nanotech company Raith USA, has proposed an FTL signaling scheme using a novel kind of quantum measurement. His proposal (which I have called KISS, for "Kalamidas's Instant Signaling Scheme) has been accepted for publication in the March 2013 issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America. A preprint version with essentially the same content as Kalamidas's JOSA article appears here.

The KISS proposal is based on the observation that one member A of an entangled pair AB can show interference effects when its distant partner B is measured in a manner that "destroys which-path information". These interference effects vanish when B is measured in a manner that detects which of two paths B actually took. On the face of it this looks exactly like superluminal signaling were it not for the fact that in order to see this interference, "coincidence information" about results at B must be sent (at light speed or slower) and this information is necessary to separate the superluminal signal from noise.

One way of looking at this situation is that, using entangled particles, superluminal signals can indeed be sent. But these FTL messages are encrypted in a perfectly unbreakable cipher that can only be decoded using a key sent at light speed or slower. So far all schemes to send signals FTL have failed due to the necessity of sending this decryption key by conventional means.

The KISS scheme purports to be different. Kalamidas proposes to destroy "which-path" information in a novel way (that involves mixing the photons that carry this information with a kind of light that possesses an indefinite number of photons). Kalamidas calculates, in his JOSA paper, that this clever new way of introducing ambiguity into the which-path measurement of the B photon has an immediate effect on its A partner -- an effect that is "in the clear" and does not need to be decoded.

Although it is evident that this proposal is a bare naked FTL communication scheme, Kalamidas modestly entitles his paper A Proposal for a Feasible Quantum-optical Experiment to Test the Validity of the No-Signaling Theorem.

Sketch of the KISS proposal (from JOSA article)

Ode to Bruce Eisner (1948-2013)

Bruce Eisner (1948-2013)

ODE TO BRUCE EISNER (1948-2013)

You wanna play around with nitrous. Nick?
Or do you want the real thing?
The big D?
Betsy and Heinz:
braver than me
My mother and my father
were braver than me.

Experience Big D:
Not LSD, not ketamine, not nitrous oxide
But the Real Thing.

The Real Thing:
Bruce Eisner just got it:
the Real Thing:
the Big D.

Not just fucking around
With sex: with the little death
with flesh, touch and ecstasy
with the dissolving of boundaries
between human beings.

Not just experimenting 
With drugs: with the terror, the ego dissolution
With the colors, the visions 
The mergings with others.
None of that
None of that kid stuff.
Are you brave enough
to experience the Big D?

None of that kid stuff
Sex, drugs and quantum physics--
the partial dissolvings
into the natural world.
The recreational explorations
The playful dissolutions:
wordless, scary, inexplicable.
But always coming home.

None of that kid stuff
Are you willing to experience
Big D?

Big D:
Total disengagement
from this habitual universe --
The end of the affair
The last goodbye
The final dissolution.

Are you willing and ready
to take the quantum leap?
Big D:
No more kid stuff

No more kid stuff, my friend.
This is the Real Thing.
You want Reality?
This is it.