Four Meetings

Nick Herbert and Rudy Rucker: Boulder Creek, CA

These days I'm pretty much of a hermit living with my cat Onyx at the Boulder Creek Quantum Tantra Ashram, going into town a couple times a week for food and spending much too much time indoors browsing the Internet. Occasionally however I enjoy meeting offline with real people.

A few days ago my friend, science-fiction writer Rudy Rucker, dropped by for his traditional yearly pilgrimage to Reality House West and brought bread and cheese for lunch. Rudy is best known for his Ware Tetralogy, a high bizarro-density drama of near-future Earth. Rudy is also a publisher (Transreal Books, Los Gatos) and the editor of Flurb, an on-line anthology of high-weirdness sci-fi stories by Rudy and his pals. He also paints pictures in a primitive style suggestive of Grandma Moses on mescaline and is an accomplished photographer.

After the usual jokes about my Dogpatch lifestyle, Rudy and I exchanged gossip and he shared the excitement about his latest project Million Mile Road Trip in which Dark Matter is made of consciousness and is called "smeal". Consciousness is one of our favorite topics and we engaged in the usual speculations typical of humans at this stage of ignorance about the way the world really works. As he departed, Rudy gifted me with Transreal Cyberpunk, a recent collection of sci-fi "buddy stories" written in collaboration with his buddy Bruce Sterling, a similarly daring explorer of edge-science themes.

Gabriel Guerrer and Nick Herbert: Boulder Creek, CA

A week after lunch with Rucker, I was visited by Gabriel Guerrer, a physicist from South America (Sao Paulo, Brazil) who is also interested in the topic of consciousness. Gabriel had worked for a year at CERN investigating the properties of B-mesons -- a peculiar member of the particle zoo that violates time-reversal invariance, a puzzling glitch in the deep nature of things. Gabriel had worked both in high-energy physics and in high-finance but is now situated at the University of Sao Paulo's Center for Anomalous Psychology attempting to replicate Dean Radin's elegant experiment measuring the effect of human intention on a laser-sourced double-slit interference pattern.

We met at my German-born friend Reno de Caro's house where we were joined by Bruce Damer and Allan Lundell (Dr Future) who participated in a conversation centered around the life experiences that led Gabriel (and the rest of us as well) to take an interest in the risky off-beat territory of consciousness research. I was pleased to see that someone so smart, enthusiastic and qualified as Gabriel was carrying on the torch. A good time was had by all. And Reno captured most of our conversation on video.

Patricia Burchat and Nick Herbert: Stanford Physics Department

About this same time last year, Reno de Caro, who is interested in the history of WW II, decided to travel to the Hoover Institute at Stanford which houses one of the world's largest collections of original documents on World Wars I and II. I decided to tag along on Reno's trip to the German-language archives both as a tour guide and as a returning alumnus of the Stanford Physics Department (graduate class of 1967). Stanford is very picturesque, a reflection of its eccentric founders. Reno brought his camera and captured some beautiful scenes, including candid pictures of excited young men and women dressed in suits and gowns to celebrate their graduation from this prestigious institution.

While Reno was busily copying microfilmed pages of the Joseph Goebbels Diaries onto a thumb drive, I ambled over to Stanford's physics and engineering sector which seemed to have quadrupled in size since I left its hallowed halls. I decided to stop in the physics office to inquire who was around during graduation break and immediately ran into Patricia Burchat, whom I recognized from alumni publications as a former head of the physics department. Jackpot! We talked about the changes in the department and what we both found exciting in the field. Before we parted, I mentioned the old grad student Christmas Party tradition of spoofing the professors and the field of physics with corny, insider-joke skits. Burchat replied that this tradition was still going on. And that she was often one of the organizers of these amateur theatrics. I told her about Les Blatt, a fellow grad student, who, if he had not majored in physics, might have made a name for himself writing Broadway musicals. I mentioned that I still possessed the script from Les's clever parody of My Fair Lady and would send her a copy when I returned to Boulder Creek.

Like Gabriel Guerrer, Patricia Burchat had spent time investigating the kinky behavior of B-mesons, not at CERN but at the BaBar B-meson factory powered by the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Burchat was a prime mover of the BaBar collaboration which published hundreds of scientific papers on the behavior of B-mesons and anti-B-mesons -- symbolized by B-bar, an upper case "B" with a line on top, hence the whimsical name for the project and its association with Babar the French elephant who naturally became the mascot of this giant particle physics collaboration. Patricia is presently associated with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile which, when completed in 2023, will take high-resolution photographs of the entire sky every three nights for at least 10 years. One of the primary goals of this full-frame sky video is to discern the effect of invisible Dark Matter on the matter we can actually see.

Blas Cabrera and Nick Herbert: Stanford Physics Department

On a second occasion when Reno was copying documents at the Hoover Institute, I took him and his camera on a tour of campus hot spots ending up again at the Stanford Physics Department. Once there I discovered that my old grad student office was now occupied by Blas Cabrera who is famous for designing a detector of magnetic monopoles that picked up a single signal of the right magnitude on St. Valentine's Day 1982. But Cabrera's detector and others like it were never able to repeat this momentous event, leading physicists to conclude that if monopoles really exist they are very rare in this part of the Universe.

In my former office I discussed with the new occupant changes in the department that had taken place since the sixties while Reno took pictures of our conversation. I was especially curious about the giant black-and-white diagrams posted in the hall outside Cabrera's office. They looked like some kind of labyrinth or the esoteric badges of a mysterious secret society. Turns out that they are the detector design drawings for the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS). As Cabrera explained to me how these sophisticated detectors were expected to respond to Dark Matter (an explanation I could barely follow), I asked him if these giant charts represented the actual size of the Dark Matter detectors. "No," he replied. The actual detectors are only about 3 inches in diameter" "And made out of Germanium."

I found it a bit odd that the two physicists with whom I spent the most time at Stanford were both involved in experimental searches for Dark Matter: Patricia Burchat in the foothills of the Andes in Chile; and Blas Cabrera thousands of feet underground in an abandoned iron mine in Canada.

More Subatomic Particles

First 13 GeV collisions at CERN: May 20, 2015

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have for the fiirst time begun to collide protons at the record-breaking energy of 13 GeV. They are currently adjusting the collimators that protect parts of the accelerator from leakage of its own Gigavolt radiation. Especially vulnerable to fast-particle impact are the 1232 superconducting dipole magnets which guide both beams into a roughly circular path with a circumference of 27 kilometers. Early next month, serious experiments will begin at the highest particle energy every achieved in a physics lab. Congratulations, guys and gals!

CERN's new high-water mark reminds me of the first science fiction story I ever published -- in a collection called Semiotext(e) SF, edited by Rudy Rucker and Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey). This theme of the book was the exploration of dangerous edges and includes such gems as William Gibson's "Hippy Hat Brain Parasite", "The New Boy" by William S. Burroughs, Hakim Bey's "Antarctic Autonomous Zone", "We See Things Differently" by Bruce Sterling, "Six Kinds of Darkness" by John Shirley and Rudy Rucker's "Rapture in Space".

Compared to these literary heavyweights, my contribution to Semiotext(e) may seem paltry. But I'm going to take the liberty of sharing it with you anyway:

MORE SUBATOMIC PARTICLES

Only a few weeks before the Esalen Seminar on the Nature of Reality, where top physicists and philosophers gather each year to decide what portion of the Great Secret to release to the public, private researchers at the Strongly Non-linear Accelerator Center (SNAC), Bonny Doon, California, announced the discovery of a handful of new particles that sent theorists back to their blackboards and experimentalists into their tunnels for ritual confirmation. The SNAC facility, the largest of its kind, produces the strongest weird-particle beam in the Solar System.

The first of the new particles -- christened the "Sigma" in honor of San Francisco-based theorist Saul-Paul Sirag, who predicted its non-existence -- appears to be another heavy lepton, resembling in all properties (save mass) its lighter brothers Mu and Tau. Chief SNAC scientists Drs. Kenneth Goffman and Alison Kennedy are modest about their discovery. "We see weirder things on our coffee breaks," they said, insisting that the Nobel Prize be shared with their reclusive colleague Dr. Nic Harvard, who provided the drugs necessary for the fundamental break-through.

After months of secrecy, the SNAC group's unorthodox techniques were finally revealed in Kennedy's controversial article "Quantum Tantra" published in last month's "Physical Review", the major scholarly journal of the American physics community. Kennedy's paper was immediately repudiated by established physicists for its blatant violation of normal standards of professional conduct, scientific rigor, and common decency.

Unlike the Sigma, which can be observed by any physicist with a research budget the size of America's National Debt, SNAC's other new particles are invisible to everyone not in the proper state of consciousness, the first of many examples of "state-specific physics" emerging from research projects initiated in the 1960's and only now beginning to bear fruit. In addition to their unanticipated physical properties, the new particles seem to possess mental attributes as well. Making contact is easy, but scientific study of these psychic quanta -- or "Persons", as they are called at SNAC -- is possible only by researchers with strong egos, since the experience is more akin to demonic possession than data collection.


"Expect to be changed a lot, when you mess around with Persons," warn researchers Goffman and Kennedy. "Each one is unique -- an utterly alien island of consciousness. The're around us all the time now, and the only thing they want to do is get inside your mind."


"We can't keep them in the lab. They fly right through our thickest shields. Before we could shut SNAC down, trillions of merge-hungry Persons had already escaped through the walls. They're slithering into restaurants now, into laundromats, stock exchanges and shopping malls, even into your bathtubs and bedrooms, attracted by concentrations of human emotion,"


"We're terribly sorry, folks, but everyone alive is involved in this experiment now. The era of state-specific physics has arrived."

"Tantra Door" by Iona Miller

Be Not Content

Be Not Content--the eBook

For most people the book that best describes the colorful chaos of the sixties is Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a witty third-person account of Ken Kesey's prankster antics in La Honda and San Francisco. Ironically, Kesey himself, justly celebrated for his fiction, wrote little or nothing about his own drug experiences and the scenes he created around him. Tim Leary, the person most associated with publicizing LSD, wrote dozens of books (my favorite is High Priest) but no matter how high he got, Tim always remained a Harvard professor so that even his most ecstatic books reflect an academic perspective. And then there is Terence McKenna, one of the most thoughtful and inspiring speakers on the psychedelic experience whose talks have been lovingly collected by Lorenzo Hagerty at Psychedelic Salon.

Kesey, Leary, McKenna--plus Ram Das, Stan Grof and the Shulgins--were the literary superstars of chemical mysticism. But what of the little guy, the man in the street--who just happens to drop LSD and see God. Who speaks for him?

William J. Craddock, for one.

Bill Craddock was an outlaw motorcycle rider from San Jose with a talent for words, the discipline to produce several unpublished novels and the good luck to score a contract with Doubleday for a book about dropping LSD and seeing God at a time when such experiences were brand new. Doubleday published Craddock's book Be Not Content (a quote from Jesus) in 1970, winning high praise from a small circle of discerning readers many of whom (myself included) passed out copies to their friends and never got them back. Then Be Not Content vanished from sight--a few copies available today for $100+ on Amazon.

Be Not Content is an under-appreciated little masterpiece. It's a first-person account of what it felt like to be one of the first people (later to include millions) to take LSD and see God. LSD does not merely produce hallucinations. At high doses it can attack the very core of your being, alter what it means to be "you"--placing your very existence at risk--confront you directly with deep philosophical paradoxes and in extreme cases induce the celebrated "ego death". Perhaps the most astonishing fact about LSD--a tribute to the evolutionary robustness of the brain--is that, no matter how many weird organizational variations the drug allows your self to experience, with very few exceptions, you almost always return to "ordinary you."

When, in my youth, I was exploring psychedelics (as a scientist not as an outlaw biker), I asked a doctor friend: "Bob, what does LSD do?" He answered: "You tell me what ordinary consciousness does, Nick, and I'll tell you how LSD changes that." Nobody knows what LSD does--except of course at the level of single synapses. Politicians responded to the emergence of this powerful mind-altering substance by making it illegal--even for scientists. They trusted Nick with Plutonium--so why not LSD?

In my opinion, LSD, despite its profound effects on subjective reality, is a relatively safe window into the mysteries of human consciousness--a kind of Large Hadron Collider of the mind--and to pass laws that make outlaws of scientists for using this instrument is an ignorant and short-sighted rejection of a lucky gift from Nature and the laboratory. The so-called scientists--better-named "servants of ignorance"--who advised the US government to criminalize research on LSD and other mind-altering drugs should be publicly flogged and stripped of their PhDs.

Craddock describes his first LSD experience--plus many more--and his joyful discovery that he was not alone--that there were others who were daring to warp the very structures of their beings with the same magic substance. He had found his tribe--the others who shared the same secret. I can testify to a similar joy in discovering a small band of others with whom I could speak about the unspeakable and compare notes about Ultimate Reality.

Be Not Content is full of sillyness, stupidity and clumsy communication, including one of the most joyless one-night stands in print. One of the virtues of this book is that Craddock does not whitewash his experiences and those of his friends. He attempts to be a fair witness both to LSD insights and to LSD follies--and there were a lot of follies. Which is only to be expected. Most people in our culture are less ready for an LSD experience than people in a bow-and-arrow culture are ready for the iPhone.

Be Not Content gained a small but enthusiastic following which includes science-fiction writer Rudy Rucker (The Ware Tetralogy). Rudy has recently emerged as a sort of cyberspace Lawrence Ferlinghetti, promoting and publishing not only his own but other "beatnik science-fiction writers" most notably in his wacky webzine Flurb. As a professional writer, Rucker is learning to surf the new electronic media waves and has published a small eBooklet on how to write eBooks. One of his first eBook projects was to bring Be Not Content out of oblivion via Rudy's own Transreal Books imprint, publishing it first as an eBook and expecting to publish later as a paperback.

Rudy prefaces his eEdition of BNC with a long Craddock bio and book review which is available in its entirety on his blog. For those interested in altered states, this preface will stand as the definitive tribute to a serious psychedelic pioneer whose work deserves to be better known.

On the day that Rudy published BNC, I was invited to a music rehearsal in Soquel and stopped by Craddock's grave (which I had discovered by accident a few years back) to play him a tune and inform his ghost that his words had now been set adrift upon the internet.

On other literary fronts, my flagship book Quantum Reality has recently been transcribed to eBook and can now be read on Kindles and other hand-held devices. Also, thru the magic of print-on-demand publishing, in a few days I will release a second collection of quantum-tantra-inspired verse called Harlot Nature. A check for 15 dollars to Nick Herbert at Box 261 Boulder Creek, CA 95006 will reserve your place at the head of the stampede for this unusual work, which contains text in three languages: English, German and Dirac notation.

Jig (Out on the Ocean) for W. J. Craddock (1946-2004)

Eye-High

James Worrad, author of Eye-High

Is it possible to use the laws of optics for pleasure and profit and perhaps even to conquer the world? James Worrad answers "Yes" in his story Eye-High.

Is it possible to base a world currency on chastity instead of gold? "Why not?" answer Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia in their story The Invention of Beloved Money.

Some science fiction is mere space opera and other SF--more properly called "speculative fiction"-- expands the boundaries of the human imagination into regions that are risky, risque' and unsettling. The stories collected in Rudy Rucker's latest Flurb webzine (Flurb #13 Spring 2012) fall in this category -- highly imaginative speculative fiction. All killer; no filler.

Approach Flurb #13 with caution. Don't be lulled by Rudy's nice photographs. Some of these authors have really twisted minds. Before you dig into Flurb be sure you know the keystroke that shuts down your browser (Command-W on my machine). You have been warned. Enjoy the trip.

Sirag Numbers Enter the Canon

Saul-Paul Sirag lecturing at Esalen Institute

The Sirag Numbers, first arising in the context of "accidental commutation" in the quantum theory of angular momentum (and dedicated to Saul-Paul on his 72nd birthday), were first defined on this blog and partially "tamed" by myself and Saul-Paul Sirag.

Recently these numbers have attracted the attention of the larger mathematical community (thank you, Antti Karttunem) and are now listed in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences as Integer Sequence A196224. The Sirag Numbers were "completely tamed" by Jack Brennan, Ray Chandler, Charles P. Greathouse and Harvey P. Dale who devised formulas which generate all Sirag numbers. Happy birthday, Saul-Paul! Now that this sequence has been officially recognized, the one thing lacking is to discover an application for Sirag Numbers in the real world.

Also in the news this week, sci-fi author Rudy Rucker paid me a visit at the Quantum Tantric Ashram where we discussed philosophy and literature in my redwood forest retreat. Over tea and stollen, Rudy presented me with copies of his book of paintings Better Worlds and his latest novel, set in Santa Cruz CA, Jim and the Flims which chronicles a throroughly Ruckeresque vision of the afterlife. Hint: the Rucker afterlife is not even close to what you've been taught in school; it more resembles some seriously twisted DMT trip.

Also this weekend Beverly Rubik, a colleague from the Consciousness Theory Group and the Esalen Seminars on the Nature of Reality, invited me to Berkeley to give a talk at her Institute for Frontier Science.

Dr Beverly Rubik, PhD

I took Beverly's invitation as an opportunity to express my latest conceptions about quantum tantra and to read from my work-in-progress Harlot Nature. The talk was well-attended by a responsive crowd which included Dana Ullman, Jim Johnson and Allison Kennedy, the co-founder of the innovative Berkeley-based psychocyberdelic magazine Mondo 2000.

Nick performing at Institute for Frontier Science

After the talk Beverly treated Allison and I to supper at P. F. Chang's Chinese Bistro in Emeryville. Walking to Chang's in the dark our group was surprised by what appeared to be a hidden portal to another reality but when entered turned out to be a time tunnel memorializing the landscape's early inhabitants. Inside the portal, a parade of black stone slabs, each etched with text and pictures, told the story of Emeryville's former human habitation, brief by geological standards. A beautiful and informative piece of public art--the city of Emeryville's Shellmound Memorial.  

Entrance to Emeryville Shellmound Memorial

Candy From Strangers

FLURB #12 is here!

Rudy Rucker's shameless "webzine without a net"

FLURB tests the edges--careful!--no guard rails.

After reading Rucker & DiFilippo's Fjaerland

in FLURB12

Nick was hooked.

Inspiring fables for quantum tantrikas.

FLURB #12 is here!

FLURB #8

Uncut SF, tentacle sucking SF, uncensored, unfit for human consumption SF, free dope SF, things that men should not know SF, quantum tantric ultimate pleasure SF, naked SF--the kind men like, big-breasted SF, terrorist SF, fully erect SF, in your face SF, universe disturbing SF, what you've been waiting for all your life SF.

Flourish of trumpets. A new issue of Rudy Rucker's FLURB has arrived.

This stuff is raw meat. Some of it will be quite disturbing even to jaded sophisticates. I was amused by Charlie Anders's nanoengineered masturbation cream (Henry's Penis). I was pleasurably spooked by Rudy Rucker's creepy self-help parasites (Bad Ideas). But nothing frightened me so much as Carter Scholz's Bad Pennies. Science fiction is fun because it's fiction-play, but Scholz's story's too close to Real to be laughed away. Read and enjoy Rudy's imaginative new webzine, but stay away from Bad Pennies.

Weird Science

At 3 PM today my private Quantum Tantra research was "outed" by Rudy Rucker on Boing-Boing, the most popular blog in cyberspace. Will this unsought publicity mean that I will have to move even deeper into the woods to avoid the mass of thrill seekers eager to offer me their souls and bodies in order that they might be the first to connect with the Next Big Thing? I don't think so. Tomorrow at Boing-Boing this blinding spotlight of fame will thankfully be directed in some other direction and I will once more be freed to pursue my underground research into the nature of deep reality without oversight, without supervision, and in any crazy direction I damned well please.

Apocalypse Wow!

End-of-the World themes never seem to go out of style. In Umberto Eco's wonderful "Name of the Rose", a monastic mystery thriller, the Christian populace is terrified by the approach of the year 1000 AD, when the Devil and his demonic legions are expected to conquer the world, taking possession of human minds and bodies and inflicting unspeakable sufferings, only to be overthrown at the last moment by the Second Coming of Christ. Each age seems to be infected by its own form of inhuman devils that bubble up out of the deep subconscious, implacable enemies of mankind, the same existential nightmare operating under various names: anarchist, communist, muslim, protestant, holocaust denier, jew, terrorist and innumerable varieties of deadly heretics whose powers are so dangerous that extraordinary means must be taken by the authorities to insure their eradication. The usual liberties will be suspended, because we must protect you from Satan. So it goes.

The Second Coming of Christ. Global warming. Communist World Domination. The Great Depression. Asteroid Collision. Nuclear War. Accelerator-produced black holes. A new Black Plague. And on top of the upcoming catastrophes we're served on TV, our science fiction writers have invented hundreds more ways that human life can be destroyed or twisted beyond recognition.

I've come across so many depressing sci-fi end-of-the-world scenarios that reading sci-fi is no longer a way of escaping reality. Bummer.

Until I tried FLURB. FLURB is sci-fi author Rudy Rucker's collection of deviant inventions by his fellow toilers in the fertile field of speculative fiction. Alternative world are us. FLURB #7 is full of disturbing tales that are guaranteed to shake your mooring no matter how firmly you're anchored in ordinary reality. But Rudy's saved the best for last. The prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box is a tale by Rucker and John Shirley called "All Hangy".

Sure it's about the end of the world. But it's a kind of End Times I've been looking for all my life. One conceivable quantum tantric end game is what's depicted in "All Hangy". In "All Hangy" the world ends, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with...

Apocalypse Wow.

Fresh New FLURB!

Bizarre and prolific sci-fi author Rudy Rucker has once again released selections from his private collection of weird, barely legal and transgressive assaults on the status quo by himself and his Aegean stable of literary companions. Yes, Friends of the Real, even in today's New Dark Ages of Bush, Cheney and McCain, some fresh new Flurbish Flowers can push their way thru the mind-numbing concrete of Mass Media Hypnosis. FLURB. FLURB. FLURB. It's good for you. Especially noteworthy is Bruce Sterling's " Computer Entertainment Thirty Five Years From Today." Read FLURB or be tossed to the curb. It's that simple.

Flurbmeister Rudy

Some science fiction is just not suitable for public consumption--abnormal, diseased, disturbing, shamelessly flaunting the few taboos that still persist in these permissive times. Not fit for prime time. However there's always a few rabid fans who crave stronger stuff than mainstream SF provides. Waiter, where's my raw meat!

In the late 60s, Harlan Ellison solicited from his fellow SF writers manuscripts that their mainstream editors had rejected as too boundary-breaking, perverted or in bad taste, and collected these quirky works in a book called Dangerous Visions. To everyone's surprise appetite for weirdness had so increased in the 60s that DV became a runaway bestseller and was quickly followed by a sequel Again, Dangerous Visions.

Continuing in the Dangerous Visions tradition, SF bad boy Rudy Rucker along with Peter Lamborn Wilson (of TAZ fame) and Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus) collected bizarro manuscripts from their pals and put together a combination called Semiotext(e) SF which contains one of the earliest and most hilarious descriptions of sex in free fall that I've ever read. Later Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Review would publish a similar description of Zero-G sexual acrobatics and the ensuing controversy for a while split the magazine into two versions--one lite, one dark.

But all that flurry happened back in the dimly remembered Lithographic Era before the Internet. SF writers are still producing shocking, obscure and undefinable stories. That's their nature. But where to publish? One answer is Flurb.

Flurb represents Rudy Rucker's new role as a publisher for the too twisted works that he and his friends produce that can't find a comfortable outlet in the mainstream. You want high quality weird? Seek no further. Rudy's standards are so elastic that Flurb even published four of my quantum tantra rants.

Rudy is a multi-talented (I almost said multi-tentacled) writer who is learning to paint and has a splendid eye for photography. Reading his blog I realize that Rucker is also a splendid travel writer and this dude's been everywhere--from Tokyo to Amsterdam to the badlands of South Dakota. Oh yes, and during his wanton youth in Appalachia, Rudy sang in a rock and roll band that had something to do with pigs.

Rudy Rucker's a prolific and terrifically inventive SF writer. Most recent works: Postsingular and Mathematicians in Love. But I'm a real fan of his older stuff, notably his "Ware" trilogy Software, Wetware and Freeware. Rudy has a habit of writing his friends into his novels. Saucer Wisdom for instance features a couple suspiciously resembling me and my wife Betsy in which "I" am abducted by time-traveling saucer beings. No anal probes though. Thanks, Rudy.