Baby Steps Towards a Brand New Physics

99 Nick Chakras

BABY STEPS TOWARDS A BRAND NEW PHYSICS

Quantum theory is mankind's most successful mathematical connection with Nature. But after more than one hundred years of immense conceptual and technological success, it seems to possess at least one fundamental flaw. Despite the fact that we know that the world works by purely quantum rules, our only access to this world (so far) is via completely classical measurements. The goal of quantum tantra is to open up new doorways into Nature, new connections that are intrinsically quantum not classical, that are deep, direct and intimate and that probably have more to do with consciousness than with unconscious measuring instruments.

FASTIDIOUS PHYSICISTS

Nature's hinting there's new ways to meet Her

More intense, more engaging -- and sweeter

But like shy maiden aunts

We say "O dear me, no!" to Her Dance

"We'd rather be reading our meters."

 One possible realization of quantum tantra is that I learn to experience the physical world in a manner analogous to the way that I experience my own body. A new kind of mind-merge with matter made possible by our radical understanding of how things really work. I envision this new learning to be augmented by some sort of quantum-inspired technology which I have called a Convivium. Or sometimes an Octoscope.

Since physics is a more fundamental science then chemistry for exploring deep reality, with all honor and respect, I consider psychedelic drugs as mere training wheels compared to quantum tantra. But as a pragmatic explorer I realize you gotta use what you got.

While waiting for my Physics Muse to deliver me a Convivium or Octoscope, my most immediate way to prepare for direct entry into the quantum world appears to be expanding my awareness of this physical body that daily carries me about in the world.

So for many years, I have been carrying out a Chakra Project to expand the number of body centers into which I could place my awareness -- the main hypothesis being that a body part to which I direct my attention is in some way essentially different (in a quantum way?) from a body part that I leave unattended. I began with the Seven Classical Hindu Chakras, extended this number to Twenty-Four, then Sixty-Four, then Eighty-Four. Then finally to the Ninety-Nine Nick Chakras illustrated above. I have used this new chakra system in various ways, from systematically expanding my bodily awareness, to reciting a kind of bodily Rosary, to preparing my body for massage, to falling asleep at night by counting chakras instead of sheep.

For exploring a new territory, it's useful to have a good map. But once you're there you can toss the maps away. Follow your own interests and curiosity.

Besides the chakras, I've found many other good maps for exploring the body's wonders based on your particular training and interest.

Being mainly a bookish person, I'm not much interested in sports, but loved ocean swimming and had been a fairly good tennis player at the City Park level. For more than twenty years I have been working with weights under the direction of a world-class power lifter, ex-Marine and ex-police officer. So far, all without books.

But then I discovered Frederic Delavier's Strength Training Anatomy. 
 

Delavier's muscle maps for power lifters

Delavier is both a trained artist (five years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris) and a champion power lifter (best in France 1988). His book spends a few pages on every classic lift, and illustrates with simple color-coded drawings exactly which muscles you are utilizing for that lift. (You can confirm Delavier's insights by what parts hurt the next day.) He also includes sections on stretches for relaxing parts of the body that have been tightened by serious exercise and illustrates which muscles are involved in each stretch. Here is a video review of Delavier's wonderful book by an admiring body builder.

For the last couple of years I have been enjoying monthly massages from a lovely Buddhist masseuse who lives at Vajrapani Institute, our local Tibetan Buddhist retreat center. Her body work combines sensitive attention plus exercises in visualizing each moment as Empty, Impermanent, yet paradoxically infused with Compassion. These massage sessions got me interested in yet another book (another set of body maps).

Andrew Biel's body maps for extremely informed palpation

Andrew Biel's Trail Guide to the Body is the premier source for intelligent palpation. Both the author and the illustrator Robin Dorn are licensed massage practitioners. The trail guide metaphor is useful and witty: for example, the trip round the elbow is called "exploring Knob Hill". Dorn's skillful drawings have just enough detail to be useful yet uncluttered. You could spend a lifetime exploring your body or someone else's using this nearly 500-page book as a map. I'm currently involved in trying to confidently palpate the eight carpal bones at the base of my hand. Here's a video interview with the author who among other things describes his favorite muscle. Hint: it's a muscle you've never heard of.

Although I play jigs and reels in an Irish session band, I'm not really much of a dancer. The nearest I got to serious dancing was studying Aikido with Linda Holiday in Santa Cruz. Throwing and being thrown in many different ways by many different kinds of bodies brought me very much in touch with what being embodied actually felt like both in and out of Linda's dojo.

I was also married for more than thirty years to Betsy Rasumny, a talented improv dancer who taught and performed in New York, Montreal, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. For me, one of Betsy's finest teachings was that, for someone who is fully present, every movement can become a dance. My wife was an expert at being fully present. Among the many gifts Betsy left me after her death in 2002 was this book on body maps for dancers.

Andrea Olsen's Guide to Experiential Anatomy

Andrea Olsen's BodyStories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy is exactly what it claims to be -- a guide to actually feeling what it's like to be present in your own particular body. There are pictures of bones and muscles but accompanied with children's drawings and other art work designed to invoke the strange unspeakable mood of this particular kind of embodiment. In her dedication, Andrea Olsen states that the function of this book is not to demystify the body -- but to help embody the mystery. Designed for dancers, this book contains movement and palpation exercises both alone and with a partner and is peppered with short anecdotes (body stories) from Olsen's long career as a teacher and performer. Here is a video of Andrea Olsen giving a TED talk/performance in Monterey, CA. Is this woman embodied or what?

One version of quantum tantra would be experiential anatomy on quantum steroids. The octoscope (or convivium) would open up our universe to non-classical modes of inquiry, to brand new experiences of the physical body not to mention new experiences of the physical world, providing strange new openings into reality entirely unavailable to our species before the discovery of quantum theory.

TANTRIC TECH

When we coat our nipples with europium oxide

When we touch our tongues to crystalline tin

When we hold in our hands these obsidian palm stones

 Will She unlock Her darkness and welcome us in?

Nick discovers a convivium

The Super Natural: A Book Review

The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal

For my 80th Christmas on this planet, I treated myself to a weird hardback book by two experienced explorers of strange phenomena that lie outside of what these days passes for science. Whitley Strieber is the author of Communion in which he describes his personal contact with "non-human beings" -- contact that continues in some form to this day. Jeff Kripal is the author of several scholarly and popular books on comparative religion with an emphasis on the particular experiences which gave rise to various religious beliefs and to alleged insights into the nature of reality.

This book features each of the specialists taking turns writing a chapter, so the book reads as a dialog between an experimenter (Whitney) and a theoretician (Jeff). But this simple distinction is blurred by the fact that Whitney theorizes about the meaning of his experiences and Jeff adds experiences of his own and of his colleagues to his theories of how to deal reasonably with unreasonable experiences. This taking turns works: each man respects the other's expertise but the two do not always agree.

A further feature of this book is the fact that after he published Communion, Whitley received hundreds of thousands (!) of letters from people all over the world that had had similar bizarre experiences many of which could be classified as some sort of non-human contact -- a valuable data base for those scholars of any persuasion interested in the study of unusual human experiences. Judging from the volume of Strieber's correspondence, experiences of this sort do not appear to be rare. But for obvious reasons, people rarely talk out loud about them. Would you?

Whitley attempts to describe his experiences without injecting his own interpretations, but admits that maintaining his objectivity is difficult because these events are characterized by ambiguity and by strong emotions -- primarily fear. Kripal takes the long view, arguing that emotionally powerful, ambiguous experiences of this sort have been happening to people thoughout all of recorded history. And that some of these "non-human contacts" -- Moses with the Burning Bush, Mohammed with the angel Gabriel, for example -- have led directly to the birth of new world religions that attracted billions of followers.

So, Jeff argues, such experiences are not unimportant for human history, but we are not required to see them in the same light as did their original participants. Neither are we required, Jeff adds, to view them thru the fundamentalist goggles of atheistic materialism. Let's be real scientists here, ladies and gentlemen, he urges. Let's try to set aside contemporary prejudices and work open-mindedly to discover what these strange not-so-rare experiences are trying to tell us about the nature of human (and non-human) reality.

As Whitley succinctly puts it: "We don't know what they are because we don't know what we are."

Jeff's tentative model for understanding such experiences is that each of us is part of a Larger Mind -- the "Human as Two" in Kripal's words -- part Human and part Divine. Divine and Human? Two ill-defined words like the words Classical and Quantum, which taken together make four important concepts that humans need to learn to use correctly (we haven't yet) if we hope to better understand the mental and physical reality of which we are made.

Can the notion of being part of a Larger Mind help us to understand such unusual phenomena as mathematical prodigies, lucky hunches, numinous coincidences, voices in the head, crisis telepathy, magical links between lovers, veridical visions, "the fickle finger of Fate", scientific, musical, artistic and poetic inspiration, plus the mysterious Zeitgeist itself -- that inexorable spirit of the times that seems to carry all before it like a flood -- perhaps even making sense of the unexpected election of President Donald Trump?

Strieber's way of acquiring knowledge by direct personal experience, rather than through books or teachers, fits into a religious category called Gnosticism which has a long tradition.

Jeff Kripal & Nick Herbert, Esalen Lodge, July 2010. photo: August O'Connor

Reading Kripal's description of ancient Gnosticism in The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, I was inspired (by Big Mind?) to add my own two centavos. Jeff's text forms its scholarly core, classical human Nick (and his divine quantum Muse) provide the title and the admonition. Let the following verse express one mindful collaborative response to this challenging and unusual book:

GNOSTICISM WITH THE GLOVES OFF
by Jeff Kripal & Nick Herbert

The ancient Gnostics
Did not know what we know:
They did not have 

Modern cosmology
Quantum physics
Evolutionary biology.

Therefore
In space-time habitation
Quantum mind alive in primate body
Our priestly task is clear:

First
Listen like a sly physician
To demons, aliens, angels,
Gods, efreets and witches.

Then
By the light of wildest intuition
Expose our wise men's trinity of theories
As hidden Holy Spirit, bitches!

As hidden Holy Spirit.

Image by Todd Stock, aka Dr Paradise

The Heart of Aikido

LInda Holiday Sensei, Aikido of Santa Cruz

For a long time I have been curious about the contention that some sort of invisible energy flows between people, an energy my dancer wife Betsy referred to as "just energy, Nick" and that many Oriental thinkers have called "prana", "chi" or "ki". So I decided a long while back to see if I could experience this mysterious psychic fluid first hand and started by signing up for aikido classes at North Bay Aikido in Santa Cruz. I purchased a "gi" (aikido uniform) and three times a week I was practicing throwing and being thrown to the mat by lots of different people of assorted sizes, abilities and genders. I liked aikido a lot, both as a sport, as a novel way of interacting with strangers and as a philosophy of life.

I practiced aikido for several months until a physical condition (not related to the dojo) forced me to give up the sport and I never returned. Although I failed in my attempt to "see ki", I gained a lot of confidence in the powers of my own body plus I became acutely aware of the bodies of other people -- everyone I met I perceived as a potential aikido partner. Throwing and being thrown hundreds of times by strangers had paradoxically made me more comfortable with people and more eager to engage with them.

AIKIDO = HARMONY KI WAY
The character "ki" is derived from a picture of rice cooking in a pot.

A friend of mine is writing a book for North Atlantic Books and invited me to go with him to visit the NAB offices in Berkeley. While skimming their archives, I discovered that NAB had just published a new book Journey to the Heart of Aikido by my former aikido teacher, Linda Holiday. So I returned to my old dojo (now in a big, brand-new location) and bought a copy from Linda herself.

Journey to the Heart of Aikido

The first thing I realized when studying aikido was that "no amount of reading is going to do you any good here, Nick. Aikido is something that you can't learn from books." But once you have practiced a bit of aikido, Linda's book can help deepen your appreciation of this marvelous sport.

In her book, Linda describes two hearts. One is a physical place and the other is an invisible entity.

The physical "heart of aikido" is the Kumano Juku Dojo in Shingu, Japan, where the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba (known simply as O-Sensei = Great Teacher) began sharing this new martial art with his students. The city of Shingu is located in Pacific coastal mountains forested by Japanese sugi trees that resemble American redwoods. So much does the landscape of Shingu resemble Santa Cruz that now, largely through the efforts of aikido students, the two towns have officially become sister cities.

Given that Kumano Juku Dojo is the physical "heart of aikido", Linda describes three separate journeys to this aikido heartland. The first is the story of O-Sensei's life as a teacher of martial arts to an elite military and political class and his decision to teach a new kind of combat based on "harmony" and the notion of "no opponent". O-Sensei journeyed to Shingu to set up the Kumano Juku Dojo in a small rural town noted for its shrines, a obscure location in the Japanese countryside close to where he was born.

The second journey to the heartland is the story of Linda's own pilgrimage to Shingu to study aikido as one of the few Westerners and even fewer women members of the Kumano Dojo. O-Sensei had died a few years before Linda's arrival but she and her Western associates were privileged to practice aikido with many experts who had studied directly with the Master himself. This second story tells how Linda fell in love with aikido, and eventually with the Japanese culture and language out of which it arose.

The third journey to the aikido heartland is that of Motomichi Anno, a worker in a Japanese paper factory, who traveled to Shingu shortly after WW II to study with the mysterious martial artist in the woods and eventually become one of the directors of his dojo. Anno Sensei was one of Linda's favorite teachers. When she returned to America she invited him to come to her own dojo in Santa Cruz to teach and speak about aikido while Linda translated his talks from Japanese into English.

The journey to the "spiritual heart of aikido" consists of Linda's own impressions of her journey and her translations of the exchanges between American students and her venerable Japanese teacher about the language and philosophy that surrounds the practice of this wordless art. In these discourses, Anno Sensei gives his own impression of aikido and attempts to clarify exactly what's meant by such terms as "heart", "spirit" and yes (my old favorite) "ki", as he understands these terms as transmitted to him directly by the founder O-Sensei.

This book (richly illustrated with pictures of O-Sensei, aikido practices and the Kumano countryside) will be of interest to anyone curious about the history of aikido. Linda is a good story teller. But those who will derive the greatest value from this book will be aikido students of any rank. Reading Journey to the Heart of Aikido will deepen in many ways our appreciation of why we are taking and giving all these falls only to keep coming back for more.

Linda's book includes a glossary of Japanese words common in the aikido community and an illustrated warm-up exercise straight from the Kumano Juku Dojo. "This exercise," says Linda, "which combines meditation, breathing, visualization, and movement, is a purification practice that O-Sensei often did at the beginning of class. Its purpose is to develop a state of unity with the spirit of the universe."

The best books are written by those who love their subject. For this scholarly, inspiring and loving glimpse into the many hearts of this fascinating martial art, domo arigato. Thank you very much, Linda Holiday Sensei.

Anno Sensei and Linda Holiday Sensei

New Father-and-Son Quantum Text Book

Samarkand, Uzbekistan by Richard-Karl Karlovitch Zommer

Samarkand, one of the world's oldest inhabited cities, once prospered as a trading post on the Silk Road between China and Europe. During the Islamic Golden Age (750 AD -- 1258 AD) the city became a famous focus of Arab scholarship in astronomy, medicine and mathematics. In more modern times, there graduated from the State University of Samarkand a physicist Moses Fayngold, who with his son Vadim, also a physicist, has written a new text book on quantum mechanics, intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. I found this book rich and unpredictable and, like the romantic Silk Road metropolis, offering something fresh and exotic around every corner.

Why does the world need yet another book about quantum mechanics? This question was raised by the father. "[The father], who by his own admission, used to think of himself as something of an expert in QM, was not initially impressed by the idea, citing a huge number of excellent contemporary presentations of the subject. Gradually, however, as he grew involved in discussing the issues brought up by his younger colleague, he found it hard to explain some of them even to himself. Moreover, to his surprise, in many instances he could not find satisfactory explanations even in those texts he had previously considered to contain authoritative accounts on the subject." (from the Preface).

Unlike most conventional quantum physics texts which merely explain things, this book also focuses on many of the loopholes, exceptions, imperfections, misunderstandings, man traps and pitfalls that exist in this complex field.

When you buy a new car, you will find an Owner's Manual in the glove compartment that tells you how to change the oil and how to replace the light bulbs. But if you are handy with tools you will also want to purchase the Mechanic's Manual to learn how to do things that only professionals should attempt. And, in particular, to learn things that YOU SHOULD NOT DO. (Never unscrew part A before releasing part B.)

This new quantum text book is the equivalent of a Mechanic's Manual that makes previous text books seem mere Owner's Manuals.

Most quantum text books tell you how to do things, but I have never run across a text book like Moses and Vadim's which tells you WHAT NOT TO DO. Over and over again in this text, I ran across comments to the effect that "The naive way to do this is B, but B will give you the wrong answer. Here's how to do things right." The authors seem to have anticipated many pitfalls that lie in wait for the quantum neophyte and have posted the appropriate warnings. My guess is that these pitfalls are those into which Moses and Vadim have themselves fallen. Niels Bohr once claimed that the definition of an "expert" in a field is a person who has made all the mistakes in that field. In this unusual book Moses and Vadim give you the advantage of that kind of street-smart expertise.

Their book begins by describing some major phenomena that classical physics could not explain (black-body radiation, photoelectric effect, low-temperature specific heats and atomic spectra), then show how one simple concept--the quantization of energy--could correctly reproduce these results.

Moses and Vadim then describe the origin of Louis DeBroglie's hypothesis--that matter possesses a wave-like nature whose wavelength DeBroglie could calculate. Altho this textbook confines itself to non-relativistic quantum mechanics, I was surprised (one surprise of many) to discover that DeBroglie's calculation was motivated by special relativity which means that his discovery is deeper than necessary and transcends its non-relativistic buddies such as the Schrödinger equation.

Using the DB hypothesis to physically justify energy quantization (similar to the way that resonance modes quantize the notes of stringed instruments), Moses and Vadim then use the Superposition Principle for waves to construct an "embryonic quantum mechanics" from which much more good physics can be derived without yet mentioning the Schrödinger Equation.

This book includes in-depth discussions (always accompanied by Moses and Vadim's dependable pitfall warning signs) of most of the conventional topics in quantum theory including Hilbert space, Dirac notation, angular momentum, scattering theory, band structure, quantum tunneling, density matrices, Kaon and neutrino oscillations, quantum entanglement, CHSH, POVMs, CNOT and XOR gates, the Bloch sphere, Zeno's paradox, Schrödinger's Cat, and much much more.

Moses and Vadim also introduce a novel topic they call "submissive quantum mechanics" in which they show how to manipulate potentials to create customized wave functions never before realized in nature--a useful skill that may prove profitable in the emerging field of nanotechnology.

Again and again while reading this book I got the feeling of a wise adviser at my side. The ratio of explanatory text to equations is large--resulting in a lucidity reminiscent of the classic Feynman Lectures as well as Quantum Theory by David Bohm.

Besides devising the shortest proof of Bell's theorem, Nick Herbert's main claim to physics fame is his FLASH (First Laser-Amplified Superluminal Hookup) proposal which purported to send signals faster-than-light using a "laser-like device" to clone single photons. The FLASH proposal was refuted by Wooters and Zurek who proved that "a single (unknown) photon cannot be cloned", a result which crucially limits what quantum computers can do--for instance, when quantum hard drives or quantum DVDs are built, the no-cloning theorem provides automatic copy protection courtesy of the laws of physics.

Naturally I was curious about how Moses and Vadim would deal with my FLASH proposal in their hyper-informative "Mechanic's Manual" style. In this I was not disappointed.

The authors agree that the W&Z "no perfect cloning of unknown states" proof definitively refutes my FLASH proposal. But what about "imperfect cloning"?, they ask. And what about the cloning of states that are not completely unknown but part of a small prearranged set of known states? Moses and Vadim carefully consider these loopholes (and a few more) to the standard FLASH refutation and definitively decide that FLASH won't work. But in the course of their detailed refutation the reader learns a lot about quantum cloning machines.

This book is a wonderful Mechanic's Manual crammed full of intimate details about the operation of one of the most elegant intellectual sports cars we possess--the theory of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. But in addition to this Mechanic's Manual, I urge you to also purchase an Owner's Manual of your choice, a book that you can use to solve everyday problems in simple ways. (My own favorite Owner's Manual is the classic text by Leonard Schiff from which I learned QM in those bygone days when the world's largest particle accelerator was the Berkeley Bevatron.)

But next to your trusted Owner's Manual, be sure to include this helpful Mechanic's Manual on your book shelf, both to deepen your knowledge of quantum mechanics and to help you avoid some of its more obvious pitfalls.

This book is perfect for those quantum mechanics who know how to fix Volkswagons and now want to go to work on Porsches.

New father-and-son quantum text book

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

Two Books

HARLOT NATURE makes her debut!

HARLOT NATURE (2012) from Sea Creature Press is Nick Herbert's latest collection of visionary poetry and prose in which Nick attempts to express in words the essence of quantum tantra--the future science of the third millennium. Quantum tantra proposes to use the science of quantum physics not merely to explain new physical phenomena but to unite human minds with the minds in nature in a direct and unprecedented way. Nick supposes that many extraterrestrial cultures already enjoy this purely quantum way of merging with nature, so part of Harlot Nature explores contact with seriously advanced alien civilizations--what that might actually feel like. [For one possible fore-taste of the quantum tantric experience check out Rudy Rucker's Panpsychism Proved which Rudy published in Nature magazine in January 2006]. Besides the title work, Harlot Nature includes Tantric Jihad, How I Conquered Death, 2000-Year-Old Pickup Line, No More Safe Science, the lyrics to Urge: A Short Opera About Reality and much more.

HARLOT NATURE is itself participatory with contributions from Nick's late wife Betsy Rasumny, physics chanteuse Lynda Williams, German translations by Reno de Caro and illustrations by August O'Connor, Kim Fulton-Bennett and Khola Shou Herbert.

For more information

 about HARLOT NATURE

see the TWOBOOKS site
or my Lulu page

PHYSICS ON ALL FOURS returns!

 Modern physics
is fully erect science.
Quantum tantra
is physics on all fours.

PHYSICS ON ALL FOURS (2000) is the predecessor text to Harlot Nature, Nick Herbert's first clumsy baby steps towards discovering a fresh intimate physics-based union with nature. Nick's son Khola Shou illustrated this book with unusual drawings of sea creatures and a smiling lion cover. Physics on All Fours includes Jabir's Formula which encapsulates the essence of quantum tantra, 99 Names of Goddess, Meta-docs on Duty, Stolen Dope, The Man Who Married the Sea plus the tantra physics anthem Elements of Tantra whose chorus echos the common theme of both Physics on All Fours and Harlot Nature.

Love every one of my elements
Caress my paradox
Embrace each phase-entangled photon
Hug my molecules; kiss my quarks.

For more information

 about PHYSICS ON ALL FOURS

see the TWOBOOKS site

Hippies in the Sunday Times

David Kaiser, MIT science historian, author of How the Hippies Saved Physics

Continuing praise for MIT historian David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics.

Here's the book's webpage with pictures and reviews.


The buzz for David's book began in the blogs--in my own blog, in Peter Woit's and Chad Orzel's. (Everyone is eagerly awaiting an endorsement from Lubos Motl, controversial physics blogoczar and kingmaker to the lucrative Czech science book market).


That initial buzz around David's book has now expanded to a ROAR with a review by George Johnson in this Sunday's New York Times. A book review in the Sunday Times is the literary equivalent of a private interview with the Pope.

Thank you, George.


George Johnson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and is the prize-winning author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, an acclaimed biography of Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann as well as many other well-crafted pieces of science writing.

George Johnson concluded his mostly sympathetic review of Kaiser's book with the judgment that much of the work of "the hippies who saved physics" was mere "physics porn"--"titillating but with no follow through".

How could Johnson have known in his witty putdown that one of the goals of my own quantum tantra research is to discover a more intimate way of connecting with nature than merely reading the results of classical instruments?

In writing his review, George Johnson knew nothing of Lifting the Veil of a New Sensual Science, of Tantric Jihad, of Future Science, No More Safe Science, of Physicist, Heal Thyself or of Opening Night.

Unaware of Harlot Nature, Johnson was able to accurately intuit my work as a species of "physics porn".

Will future generations recognize science journalist George Johnson not only for his substantial body of science writing but also as an unconscious herald of the freshest and most unlikely revolution in modern physics?

George Johnson, author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

When the Impossible Happens

August O'Connor encountering a Groffian impossibility

How would history have changed had Sigmund Freud's favorite drug been LSD instead of cocaine?

Using lysergic acid instead of analysis to access the unconscious mind, Freud's career might have resembled Stan Grof's as recounted in When the Impossible Happens. Freud might have escaped his dreary office in Vienna, lived 14 years at Esalen Institute, taken peyote with Indians in Kansas, MDA in Palenque and ketamine in Machu Picchu, guided hundreds of patients thru the tangled jungles of their own personalities using LSD sessions, Holotropic breath work and other radical mind-opening techniques. Like Freud, Grof brings a sophisticated European mind set to bear to evaluate a lifetime of extraordinary experiences. Unlike Tim Leary and Terence McKenna, who were of Irish blood, Stanislav Grof was born in Czechoslovakia and possesses a "Slavic soul" which binds him solidly to the soil even as his yearnings for the infinite bring him face to face with experiences that would shake the sanity of many less solidly grounded men.

I'm sure that if Stan were to encounter Satan (which he does in one of the episodes in this book) he would do so calmly, all senses alert, pushing his fear into the background while striving rationally to assess the true dimensions of the experience. Stan is a compassionate scientist and brave explorer of the heights and depths of human consciousness. Of all of his many books, When the Impossible Happens is the most biographical and offers personal stories of the most astonishing high points of his long career as an passionate courtier of non-ordinary realities.

His book consists of more than 60 short episodes, from Stan Grof's first LSD experience as a fledgling doctor in Prague, to his years with his wife Christina as scholar-in-residence at Esalen, to psychic adventures in Iceland, Brazil, Mexico and Australia. This is a book of experiences not theory. And, as the title suggests, many of his experiences would be considered "impossible" according to our present model of the human mind which holds that consciousness is solely the product of some (as yet unknown) process in the brain--a position called "reductive materialism" by its supporters and "promissory materialism" by its critics. Just as the goal of modern physics is to explain not only the ordinary world but every sort of outlandish physical phenomena made accessible by Hubbles, LHCs and even newer probes on the horizon, so any serious psychologist (mind scientist) should welcome this account of dozens of exotic psychological "quarks" and "gluons" observed during a lifetime of exploring the extreme edges of human experience.

Stan is an splendid story teller and one finds oneself experiencing the emotions that he must have felt as the events were actually happening. I was pleased to discover his account of an extraordinary adventure in which I played a small role--Stan's marriage to Joan Halifax which took place in a volcanic caldera in Iceland, in a Viking wedding ritual designed by Icelandic mythologist Einar Pallson and Joseph Campbell, who gave away the bride. My wife Betsy and I brought the traditional child to the wedding--our son, Khola, who had just celebrated his second birthday a day before with the children of the kitchen staff. We wedding guests arranged ourselves in a ring around the edge of the caldera and after the ceremony, Stan and Joan went around the circle to be congratulated. At the moment when Betsy, Khola and I embraced them, the midnight sun which had temporary dipped below the horizon, suddenly rose and flooded the five of us with its brilliant light.

I know Stan slightly but over the years our paths have crossed several times since that first meeting in Iceland. As a fellow Slav and a member of his wedding I feel a personal bond. I admire him as an expecially bold scientist and always feel a bit high when coming into his presence.

Nick's not the only one who admires Stan Grof. In 2007, Vlaclav Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia, presented the VISION 97 award to Stan for his pioneering research into non-ordinary states of consciousness.

When the Impossible Happens is one of the best tour guides I can recommend into the details of some of those non-ordinary states.

Next month Dr. Stanislav Grof will experience his eightieth trip around the Sun.

Happy Birthday, Stan!

Stan Grof at Esalen SuperSymposium IV

8 Holiday Books

Wondering what to give the book lovers on your holiday list? Why not ignore the blockbuster bestsellers and go for the unique and unusual this year? Here's a selection of some of Nick Herbert's favorite things in print.

1. Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert. Not only one of the best popular books on quantum physics but also the best book about the quantum reality question--a problem so simple to state (what is a measurement?) but so difficult to solve that it continues to baffle every physicist who has ever encountered it. QR is your royal road to this deep quantum mystery.

2. The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Mechanics Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. "Entanglement" is an intimate connection between things only possible in quantum physics. Through lively imagined conversations between physicists, Gilder describes the birth and development of this new quantum intimacy and its present exploitation in the growing fields of quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

3. The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse by Dale Pendell. A kind of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the entire human species. Pendell is best known for his three-volume history of mind-altering drugs from coffee beans to ecstasy. Pendell's Great Bay has been aptly described as "wise, cunning, ecological fiction."

4. The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker (introduction by William Gibson). Rucker's science fiction is truly twisted, bizarre and wildly funny. Although described as a "cyberpunk", Rudy disdains the cyberpunk label in favor of his own one-man genre of "beatnik science fiction". Here in one volume are four of Rucker's most imaginative (and my favorite) novels: Software, Wetware, Freeware and Realware.

5. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey Kripal. The official history of the flagship growth center in Big Sur that continues to foster innovative movements in psychology, bodywork, international relations and other facets of "the human potential". Full of stories of people and ideas. Kripal covers in full Esalen's almost-50-year-old history. Another good book about Esalen's early years is Walter Truett Anderson's Upstart Spring.

6. My all-time favorite book of erotic fiction is Raold Dahl's My Uncle Oswald which describes a conspiracy to gather the sperm of famous men, including Einstein, Bernard Shaw and the King of Sweden, to sell to wealthy women. Hilarity ensues. A promising first novel Delphian Blue by "Gregor Severine" imagines a planet inhabited by a powerful shape-shifting Male Presence. Not surprisingly (for a "spiritual-erotic novel") the crew of the first Federation ship sent to explore Delphia 3 consists of six Earth females with very different abilities and temperaments. A holodeck fantasy run amok.

7. Everybody loves Dr Suess books but "That famous Cat in the Hat? Nick does not like that Cat!" Nick's favorite Suess book is I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. My son Khola liked it too, but his all-time favorite children's book was Kick, Pass and Run--a book about animals learning to play football. Betsy and I must have read him KPR a thousand times.

8. Santa Cruz, CA boasts a vibrant poetry scene, partly due to the efforts of Len Anderson and Dennis Morton who host the Poetry Santa Cruz website and associated readings. Len Anderson, a Berkeley physics PhD, recently published Affection for the Unknowable, a collection of his poems. Other fine Santa Cruz poetry collections include Robert Sward's 4 Incarnations, Patti Sirens' Antarctica and a recent anthology Harvest from the Emerald Orchard featuring 18 Santa Cruz poets. Behave like a Medici. Become a patron of the arts. Purchase a few books of poetry.

What Books Changed Your Life?

On the Monroe Institute website, Leslie French asks the provocative question: "What books changed your life?" She cites her own life-changing books as do many others in her comments section.

I confess that as long as I've been able to read, I've been a book slut. I love books, buy books, devour books and possess several library cards. Books have been changing my life for as long as I can remember. But which are THE BOOKS, the books that made a difference? I decided to limit my selection to ten books, to include only books that purport to be non-fiction and to list these books in rough chronological order of their influence at various stages of my life. To all those dozens of books that spring to mind shouting "Choose me! Choose me!" I have to say "I love you all, and it pains me to not include you, but, as anybody connected with the book business knows, editors have to be ruthless!"

1. The Baltimore Catechism: gave me the answers at age 6 to questions that still puzzle me today.

2. St. Joseph's Missal: you can't follow the players (at the Mass) without a scorecard especially when the game's conducted in Latin.

3. Introduction to Complex Variables: imagine discovering for the first time the existence of another kind of number (complex numbers) than the kind you count with, whose properties are strange, beautiful and utterly logical.

4. Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Schiff: my first introduction to the strange world of quantum physics. At Stanford, prime breeding ground for big egos, Schiff was famed for his extraordinary modesty.

5. The Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Paul Dirac: Closest thing to The Bible in quantum physics. Dirac introduces here his ideosyncratic bra/ket notation which is now the language in which every physicist in the world expresses the quantum mysteries.

6. The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts: In the early 60s, living in San Francisco, I first read Alan Watts's description of his LSD trips and decided that someday I too would drop acid.

7. Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert: no better way to understand a subject than to write a book about it.

8. Not Man Apart by Robinson Jeffers: "Love that, not man apart from that..."

9. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding..."

10. The Penny Whistle Book by Robin Williamson: former member of Incredible String Band teaches the art of the Irish whistle. With this book and 10 years of practice you could be a star.

And to all those books left out, I repeat: "I love you dearly, but an editor's gotta edit."

A Book About Reality

Quantum theory is without doubt the most successful tool for manipulating matter that humans have ever possessed. Over scales ranging from quarks to quasars not one of quantum theory's predictions (some checked to 11 decimal places) has ever been falsified. Much of today's industry--silicon chips, lasers, hard drives, flash memory, for example--would be impossible without the precise understanding of matter's behavior that quantum theory provides.

But this overwhelming success comes with a peculiar price tag: Use this theory; lose Reality.

The deepest unsolved question of quantum theory is this: how can we properly conceive a model of the world for which quantum theory is a correct description? No one has posed the Quantum Reality Question better than UCSC professor Bruce Rosenblum who says: "Classical physics could explain the world but got some of the details wrong; quantum physics gets all the details right but can't explain the world."

Quantum theory describes the world in two ways, depending on whether it's being measured or not. When not measured, it's described by a wave of probabilities (called the psi-function); when it's measured, it turns into actual particles.

The Quantum Reality Question resolves itself into two parts:

1) The Interpretation Question: what does the psi-function actually stand for? What in the world is going on when we aren't making measurements?

2) The Measurement Problem: what happens during a measurement when (in the theory at least) waves turn into actual particles?

A successful Quantum Reality would tell us: 1) what the world is like when it's not looked at and 2) how the act of looking changes the unobserved world into the world we see.

In my book Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics I consider eight candidate models for a viable way of conceptualizing the world including Hugh Everett's Many-Universe Model (QR #4) and Werner Heisenberg's version (QR #8).

In Everett's Many-Universe Model, the psi-function describes not possibilities but actualities--Everything that can happen really does happen in one universe or another. That's what's going on in the world when you don't look. When you look, the universe you happen to be in splits into all possible outcomes of the measurement you chose to make but you are conscious of inhabiting only one of these branching paths. As preposterous as this model appears it ranks as the most detailed and mathematically consistent model of Quantum Reality yet put forth. The fact that such an outlandish model of reality is taken seriously by smart people is a measure of how desperate physicists have become in their quest to solve the Quantum Reality Question.

Heisenberg's Model proposes that there is only one world. But when nobody looks it's just a world of possibilities. Whenever somebody looks, one of these possibilities becomes actual. Heisenberg fails to tell us though, how the first real look happened in a world of pure possibility, nor does he say what a look looks like--that is, which sorts of interactions in the world qualify as "looks" and which are merely inconsequential dances of possibilities.

Unlike many popular physics books that trumpet the colorful successes of physics, Quantum Reality focuses single-mindedly on physics' most conspicuous failure--the Quantum Reality Question as the most embarrassing skeleton pushed way into the back of physics' secret closet. Quantum Reality explores in great detail a deep and glaringly unsolved problem located not in the hidden recesses of elementary particles or in some galaxy far away but right here at home--an unsolved mystery located literally everywhere we look.

None of the eight proposed Quantum Realities (and others since invented) feels right to me. No one today, I think, really knows how this world works. One easy way to fluster a physicist: ask what he/she thinks of the Measurement Problem.

Quantum Reality has been translated into German, Japanese and Portuguese. Nick gets about $1 in royalties for every copy sold. Recently made available (Dec 2011) as an E-book.

Beverly Rubik, PhD, in Italy

Sexual Paradox

"[Sexual Paradox] gives rise to reproductive strategies which are polarized and divergent, although the roles are also highly complementary. There is thus a temptation for one sex to defect against the other and to try to assert reproductive dominance. Many religions and religious texts appear to be an attempt by males to gain control of culture and assert reproductive dominion over women by a variety of coercive and oppressive methods. These are contrary to nature and the evolutionary process. Although there are strong mutual and complementary forces in human sexual partnership, and male choice of female partners is a strong selective force, female reproductive choice is paramount in the sexual symmetry breaking. Astute female reproductive choice is the most powerful evolutionary dynamic in the flowering of human culture and super-intelligence and is key to human futures."

(pix of Christine Fielder & Chris King

authors of "Sexual Paradox")

Thanks to Iona Miller who briefly describes this book:

"This book is about sexual paradox, the nemesis of our pretensions, yet the genesis of our living destinies. It demonstrates that sexual paradox is at the core of all descriptions of reality, lurking in the quantum realm and in the relationship between body and mind as much as in our hormone-steeped bodies and rising pulses. It presents the idea of sexual paradox, not as an inscrutable icon for the vagaries of sexual intrigue, but as a cosmic principle spanning the widest realms, from physics, though biology, to our social futures."

Dale Pendell. the Psychobotany Guy

I met Dale Pendell many years ago in Santa Cruz, CA at his home near Neary Lagoon, a compact little wetlands sanctuary flanked by a large sewage disposal plant--odd juxtaposition of the wild and the tame. As befits a psychobotanist, Dale's house was crawling with exotic plants inside and out, his front porch crowned by a gigantic Datura plant whose sinister-looking white trumpet flowers put out a sweet, seductive scent. Mercury Press had just published Dale's first book in the celebrated "Pharmako" trilogy which he was promoting while researching book #2.

Dale later moved from Santa Cruz into the hinterlands so I now see him infrequently but each time we meet I get a lot of juice from this guy. A while back we gave a seminar together at the pagan gathering "Pantheocon" at a big hotel in San Francisco on Valentine's Day. Dale talked about plants and I presented an early version of quantum tantra. At this same conference a pretty pagan boldly opened her blouse for me to show a paw print she had had tattooed between her breasts.

Then I met Dale a second time with his partner Laura in a mock Moorish auditorium at the "Sacred Elixers" conference in San Jose where he performed "Amrita" and other poems to an appreciative audience that included Earl and Sherri Crockett as well as Sasha and Ann Shulgin.

Dale Pendell's "Pharmako" trilogy surveys the history, composition and usage of a wide variety of psychoactive plants. The books themselves, like their author, are hard to categorize, part botany, part history--poetry, dialog, chemistry, commerce and physics. Reading one of Dale's books is like exploring a labyrinthine jungle with a witty and knowledgeable native guide. This guy really knows his stuff. Pendell calls the study of plant powers "the Poison Path" for which his trilogy is an indispensable field guide. This noteworthy trio of books is strange, scholarly and full of good sense.

1. Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons and Herbcraft
   
2. Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulation Plants, Potions, Herbcraft
3. Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path

The best introduction to Dale Pendell's life and work is Emily Green's LA Times interview "The Poet of Plants". Like Nick Herbert, Emily Green finds Dale Pendell impossible to categorize. Dale and his writings are in a class by themselves.

Recently Dale published "Inspired Madness", a book about Burning Man, and a collection of conversations with the controversial UCSC professor Norman O Brown, the author of "Love's Body". From a collection of Dale's plant poetry: "Living With Barbarians" comes this:

Every plant is a teacher--

but as in every crowd,

there are always

a few loudmouths.

Nick's Favorite Quantum Textbooks

I've been out of (formal) school for several decades so am not familiar with modern textbooks on quantum mechanics. There certainly must be newer books that teach the subject better than the books I learned from, but I still like and remain faithful to my first loves.

One of the best books on how to actually use quantum theory to solve practical problems is Leonard Schiff's Quantum Mechanics . In the first chapter Schiff (who was a fellow native of Columbus, OH) poses a problem which still continues to stimulate my imagination. One ping pong ball is glued to a table top; a second ping pong ball is suspended 10 ping pong ball diameters above the first. Schiff's question: when the first ball is released, what is the maximum number of bounces it executes before falling off the ball fastened to the table?

In classical physics it is theoretically possible for you to locate the second ball EXACTLY above the first so the number of bounces would be infinite. But in quantum physics (Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle), if the position of the ball is exactly specified, the momentum uncertainty is infinite so you cannot be sure of getting even one bounce. What you must do is find the right mix of position and momentum uncertainties that maximizes the number of bounces. I solved this problem a long time ago and forgot the answer.

The British physicist P.A.M. Dirac's classic textbook The Principles of Quantum Mechanics introduced the whimsical and useful Dirac "bra" and "ket" notation for quantum states. The quantum state of, say, an electron can be represented as a ket |electron> which represents a vector in Hilbert space which encodes all that can physically be known about that electron. Now you get to choose what you want to know. If you want to know about the electron's position x, you multiply the electron ket by the position bra <x| to obtain the bra-ket expression <x|electron> which is the electron's QUANTUM WAVEFUNCTION in position space. Likewise if you want to know the electron's momentum p, you multiply the electron ket by the momentum bra Ep| to obtain the bra-ket expression <p|electron> which is the electron's quantum wavefunction in momentum space. Like so many other underappreciated intellectual inventions (Arabic numerals, for example), the Dirac bra/ket notation allows lesser minds than Paul Dirac to do very smart things without having to be very smart.

<x|electron> is Dirac notation for electron wavefunction in position space.

<p|electron> is Dirac notation for electron wavefunction in momentum space.

This simple notation conceals piles and piles of complicated mathematics that you don't really want to think about--and thanks to Dirac, you don't have to.

In person, Dirac had the reputation of acting "extremely rational"-- like Spock in Star Trek. One of many Dirac stories has him writing equations on the board and then asking the class if there were any questions: "Yes" said a student, "I am confused about your derivation of XYZ". "That is not a question, " Dirac replied, "That is a fact."

In graduate school none of us understood what quantum theory actually meant as we were learning how to use it to solve problems increasingly more difficult than Schiff's ping pong balls.

One text book that attempted to deal with what quantum theory meant was David Bohm's Quantum Theory which for a physics book has an exceptionally high ratio of explanatory text to mathematical equations. One of the themes of Bohm's book was to expand on John von Neumann's proof that the statistical predictions of quantum theory could not be reproduced by some underlying deterministic hidden variable theory. Bohm shows in his book why hidden variables are impossible. Ironically, later in his career, David Bohm constructed a successful hidden variable model of quantum theory that still has its defenders and which inspired Irish physicist John Stewart Bell to devise his justly famous non-locality theorem

A few years ago, Australian philosopher of mind David Chalmers put out the call for the best book on quantum theory suitable for beginning philosophy students (my own Quantum Reality was rightly judged as too advanced). My vote (and the book that won) was for the book Ghost in the Atom which is a series of BBC interviews with various physicists about the meaning of quantum theory. The lucid introduction by physicist Paul Davies is alone worth the price of this book. A wonderful introduction for ordinary people to the dilemmas faced by modern physicists as they attempt to understand "how Nature does it."