Detour John

Quantum Physicist or Outlaw Biker?

Several years ago my friend Fred McPherson and I carried out a monthly Dump Run Ritual. We'd get up early, put on our old clothes, load up Fred's pickup truck with trash, brush and garbage from both our homes, then drive to the outdoor dump in Ben Lomond where we would empty the truck and hung out with other dumpers and scavengers. Afterwards we would return to Boulder Creek to eat lunch and drink beer at Adelita's Mexican restaurant -- alas no longer in business -- which served the best chile rellenos in Santa Cruz county.

As we pulled into Adelito's parking lot we noticed a cluster of newly arrived bikers who belonged to one of the local outlaw motorcycle clubs and who seemed to share our taste in Mexican food. (Such clubs were plentiful in Boulder Creek in the old days, but today a guy on a Harley in Boulder Creek is more likely to be a manager at Apple than a Hell's Angel from Oakland.) These guys in the lot were the real thing, not Angels I think but some local gang like Ghost Riders from Lompico.

The bikers watched our truck pull up. And then the biggest, hairiest and most decorated of these Black Knights of the Road slowly walked over to my side of the car. I had no idea what to expect as this Levi-jacketed berserker stared me right in the eye and reached for my door handle.

Suddenly the big biker stopped and laughed. "Excuse me," he said. "I thought you were somebody I knew." Then he turned and sauntered back towards his pack. "Hey, come back here," I shouted to his retreating form, no longer puzzled about his purpose. When he turned in our direction, I asked him what was the name of the guy that I reminded him of?

"Detour John," said the biker and rejoined his crew.

I really like the name.

And it amused me immensely that Nick Herbert could be mistaken in Boulder Creek for an outlaw biker. But most of all, I was pleased that somewhere in this marvelous world there exists an outlaw biker whose name is Detour John and who looks like a quantum physicist from Stanford.

Speaking of quantum physics, Nick just co-authored a physics paper on a special class of faster-than-light signaling schemes. John Cramer (University of Washington, Seattle) came up with an original idea for an FTL signaling scheme that involves polarization-entangled photons interacting with a novel beam-spitting device -- a device which I dubbed the "Cramer wedge". At first, it looked as though this wedge could robustly accomplish its intended job, and that FTL signaling was indeed within our grasp. However soon John and I were able to show to our satisfaction, that when the operation of this wedge is correctly calculated, all signaling effects vanish. Our paper entitled "An Inquiry into the Possibility of Nonlocal Quantum Communication" is scheduled to be published in Foundations of Physics journal. A preprint of this work is available today on the ArXiv.

I was honored to be asked by John Cramer to take time out of my busy life to collaborate with him on this paper. I was glad for the chance to work with a famous physicist on a new FTL scheme that I had never before encountered.

Thanks for the engaging detour, John.

Illustration from the Cramer-Herbert paper on subtle FTL communication schemes