The Scientific American Interview

Scientific American 1905

When I was growing up in Columbus, Ohio, I read everything I could get my hands on. One of the most curious books in my home library was my father's pair of bound volumes of reprints from old Scientific American magazine issues from the beginning of the 20th Century. These pages featured giant construction projects, huge airships, early radio accomplishments and predictions of a brighter, more noble and much more electrified future.

Little could Nick imagine that one day he himself would appear in this renowned popular science magazine in a column called Cross-Check (named after an illegal ice hockey move) being interviewed by John Horgan, the author of Rational Mysticism and The End of Science. Besides Nick Herbert, Horgan's interviewees have included physicists David Bohm, Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten, Martin Rees, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin and many others, a very distinguished company of thinkers.

Horgan's interview was motivated by my 10th anniversary blog post and by my big role in David Kaiser's recent book How the Hippies Saved Physics.

Among Horgan's questions to me were:
How did you end up as a physicist?
How did you end up as a hippy?
Is quantum mechanics the key to explaining consciousness?

Get the answers to these questions (and more) at John Horgan's Scientific American Cross-Check blog post: Chasing the Quantum Tantra.

Nick Herbert resting from the chase.

 Simultaneous with this blog post, John Horgan had just completed a magnum opus on the nature of consciousness, a book called Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are which he made available for free on the Internet at mindbodyproblems.com. In this book, Horgan interviews nine specialists representing nine different perspectives on human subjectivity. This book is unusual in that Horgan does not just interview these nine people about their ideas but about their personal lives as well. John's curiosity and desire to really know what's going on entangles himself and the reader in a sometimes embarrassingly intimate connection with some of these scientist's personal lives. For that reason, this book is a lot more lively than your typical psychology textbook.

John Horgan, author of Mind-Body Problems.

For my evaluation of this engaging book, I can do no better than echo the opinion of Deepak Chopra in the Discussion section:

"Giving an abstract problem a human voice -- in this case ten voices, counting the author and the nine people he interviewed -- has many rewards. We get something close to the real texture of how ideas are woven into biography. These ten people -- like all people -- lead lives in which mental activity cannot be tweaked out and examined objectively. I envy Horgan his ability to convey the lived-in quality of thinking."

Horgan's logo for Mind-Body Problems

TEN YEARS OLD: QUANTUM TANTRA BLOG

Ten Years Old

Quantum Tantra Blog is now 10 years old. Happy Birthday, old friend!

During its life QTB has published 495 posts which have received more than 500,000 views. The blog is mainly a kind of diary of the major concerns and accomplishments of Nick Herbert and his alter ego Doctor Jabir 'abd al-Khaliq.

Nick's primary goal is to father a brand new physics (Quantum Tantra) which will connect us all with Nature in a more direct and intimate way. This quest has generated dozens of pages of quirky quantum tantric poetry but no concrete physical results as yet. But I continue to pursue this "impossible dream".

The quest begins with quantum mechanics, the most successful theory of the physical world ever devised, which comes at the price of physicists not knowing what this theory actually means: the "quantum reality problem" -- about which I wrote my first book Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics.

One of the important milestones in quantum reality research is Bell's Theorem in which Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proved that although the quantum facts are everywhere "local", the quantum reality underlying these fact must be "non-local". The term "non-local" essentially means "faster-than-light", which Albert Einstein declared verboten in physics.

John Stewart Bell: Reality is Non-local

But, in a truly peculiar twist of logic, Bell's faster-than-light proof applies only to REALITY not to the FACTS. Einstein's prohibition still holds for the world we can see; only the invisible reality behind these facts must be faster-than-light.

Bell's Theorem has led to many clever attempts to move FTL REALITY into FTL FACT. One of my hobbies is superluminal signaling schemes, many of which are described in my book Faster-Than-Light: Superluminal Loophole in Physics and in quite a few of my QTB blog posts.

In fact, exactly ten years ago, as I was just beginning this blog, I had just published, in the physics arXiv, a FTL communication scheme called ETCALLHOME which was refuted within 24 hours by Israeli physicist Lev Vaidman.

Demetrios Kalamidas: inventor of KISS

The most exciting FTL scheme reported in QTB was the KISS proposal of Demetrios Kalamidas which uses a kind of "fake news" effect to exploit quantum path entanglement to send superluminal signals. Six prominent physicists, including one of Kalamidas's former optics professors, were involved in KISS's eventual refutation.

KISS: A New Superluminal Commication Scheme
Demetrios: the Opera
The Kalamidas Experiment
FTL Signaling Made Easy
Kalamidas Refuted
The Kalamidas Experiment: Easy Pickings

The refutation by Wootters and Zurek of one of my own FTL schemes, called FLASH, led directly to the quantum no-cloning rule, a result important in the field of quantum computing since it proves that, unlike classical information, such as a jpg of your cat, which can be exactly copied, perfect cloning of quantum information violates the laws of Nature. The story of the discovery of the no-cloning rule is the centerpiece of David Kaiser's recent book How the Hippies Saved Physics which also recounts the adventures of some of my disreputable physics friends.

David Kaiser and some hippies who "saved physics"

Kaiser describes the Esalen Seminars on the Nature of Reality, hosted by myself and eccentric mathematician Saul-Paul Sirag, where for eight years prominent physicists were invited to discuss Bell's Theorem along the Big Sur cliffs and in the Esalen sulfur baths. Through the good graces of Fed Ex philanthropist Charles Brandon we were able to award, in Esalen's Big House, the Reality Prize to John Bell (theory) and John Clauser (experiment) for their decisive demonstration of quantum reality's necessary non-locality, possibly the first time these guys's important achievements were publicly recognized.

Esalen Reality Prize Day. Left to Right: Charles Brandon, Nick Herbert, Adriana Chernovska, John Clauser, Saul-Paul Sirag, Bernard D'Espagnat (John Bell's proxy), Henry Stapp. Nick's son Khola in front holding wine glass

Also in QTB, I describe my collaboration with Saul-Paul Sirag in elucidating the nature of the Sirag Numbers, a sequence of integers indirectly related to the quantum theory of angular momentum. Later, I give a brief biography of Saul-Paul (who was born in a concentration camp) as preface to a review of his new math book ADEX Theory: How the ADE Coxeter Graphs Unify Mathematics and Physics.

Saul-Paul Sirag, eccentric mathematician

In 2014, the city of Belfast celebrated the 50th anniversary of Bell's Theorem by naming a street in its Titanic district after his theorem and by hosting a museum exhibit of works of art inspired by Belfast-born John Bell. My song Bell's Theorem Blues was chosen as one of the exhibits and was performed by local (Boulder Creek) vocalist Joy Rush, pianist Jack Bowers with George Galt on harmonica. The festival could not afford to pay our fares to Ireland but you can listen to the recording we sent and read the lyrics here.

BC Blues Trio: George Galt, Jack Bowers, Joy Rush

In this blog I also recall my two meetings with John Stewart Bell at the home of Stanford physics professor Pierre Noyes.

In the spirit of our old quantum physics seminars, Esalen has been hosting invitational meetings on the more general topic of human Superpowers, initiated by one of its founders Michael Murphy and expanded by extraordinary religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal. Most of these superpowers are considered IMPOSSIBLE so they thought it might be fun to have a few physicists on board. I was invited to two of these seminars including one devoted to the extraordinary levitations of St Joseph of Copertino, chronicled in the recent book by Michael Grosso The Man Who Could Fly. This seminar inspired my own levitation project, a subset of my quantum tantra urge to learn to relate to Nature in radical new ways.

Jeff Kripal & Nick Herbert: Old Esalen Lodge

As part of my project to relate to Nature in brand new ways, I invented the Metaphase Typewriter, a quantum-random putative mechanical spirit medium. In common with all of Nick's efforts so far, this project seemed to utterly fail. But recently the Metaphase Typewriter was revived as an art project by Lynden Stone in Queensland, Australia and by Dmitry Morosov in Moscow.

Lynden Stone's Erwin's Puss

While Nick was waiting for the Messiah to come (a play on the name of the wonderful picture book about Esalen by Bernie Gunther : What to Do Till the Messiah Comes), he fell in with a bunch of rowdy Irish musicians in Santa Cruz, learned to play the Irish whistle, and became part of a band called Blarney which plays at private parties and (a few times) on stage. My biggest achievement as member of the wonderful Blarney band was the composition of a patter song, 32 Irish County Jig, that recites each of Ireland's 32 counties. I am really surprised that no one else had ever done this before.

Blarney Band: Matt Johnson, August O'Connor, Kim Fulton-Bennett, Nick Herbert

Then there is my poetry ("the kiss of death" according to my literary agent John Brockman). In Boulder Creek, for a dozen or so years, there arose a remarkably fertile poetry movement, which I call the Bistroscene after Conrad Santos's Boulder Creek Bistro where a majority of the action took place and where I premiered my quantum tantric poems and many others. Many of these performances were videoed by Alan and Sun Lundell (aka Dr and Mrs Future) and are still being rediscovered as Al and Sun transfer their ancient video formats to archival hard drive.

Kiss My Bare Art
The New Sex Robot
He Did Not Die
Harlot Nature
ZAM
2000-year-old Pickup Line
The Aphrodite Award
Los Gatos Apple Store
Maya

Celebrating the Irises
Mayday Play

Regarding weird literary output, it would be impossible to ignore my friend Rudy Rucker, the Lawrence Ferlinghetti of cyberspace. Rudy conceived and published Flurb, an online magazine of radically trippy inventions, including some of my own stuff and the most imaginative alien psychedelic I have even encountered -- James Worrad's Eye-High.

Since quantum tantra (the search for new doorways into Nature) is still in its embryonic stage, there is very little concrete accomplishments to which I can point. Here however are a few teasers:

Abu Asks About Quantum Tantra
No More Safe Science
Opening Night
Happy Doomsday
Greatest Pleasure
Elements of Tantra

Urge: A Short Opera about Reality
Tantric Jihad: the Video
Quantum Tantra Stripped Bare

In this short post, I cannot cover completely all ten years of my blog: I have decided to exclude the numerous book reviews and friends' obituaries (except for my two younger brothers Tom and Duke and my cat Onyx). Please click the tags for topics and people that interest you. My apologies to everyone I have left out. Although concrete quantum tantric research seems at an absolute standstill, I can at least briefly brag about six minor accomplishments:

Nick Herbert aka Dr. Jabir

I self-published two books of verse: Physics on All Fours and Harlot Nature;
I invented 99 new chakras: 99 Nick Chakras;
I invented a new (Ukrainian) holiday: YIDD;
I invented a new (imaginary) element: Khaliqium;
I invented a new (psychic) currency: Khlit Coin;
I devised a new proof that classical and quantum ESP powers must be precisely equal: Nick's Proof.

The quantum tantra posts with the most views ares:
1. Schrödinger's Proof for the Existence of God
2: Does Consciousness Create Reality?
3. Jailbait

Many thanks to all my viewers.

Happy 10th Birthday, dear Quantum Tantra Blog!

Saul-Paul Sirag's New Math Book

Saul-Paul Sirag in Eugene, Oregon plus some Japanese numerals

SAUL-PAUL SIRAG'S NEW MATH BOOK

Back in the 1950s Reader's Digest ran a monthly feature "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met". In my long life I've met many such characters but Saul-Paul Sirag must be near the top of the list.

Saul-Paul was born in Borneo of Dutch-American parents who were fundamentalist Baptist missionaries to the Dayak headhunters. When Japanese troops occupied Indonesia in 1942, they imprisoned Saul-Paul, his older brother Mark and their mother Sylvia in the Banju Biru concentration camp in Java. His father, William, was interned in a separate camp where he died before the end of the war. Each morning the occupants of the camp had to line up in front of their cell blocks to count off in Japanese. I like to think that this prison-camp countdown was Saul-Paul's first experience of an exotic form of mathematics.

Back in the States, Saul-Paul was educated in various ultra-conservative Baptist schools, most notably Christ's Home in Warminster, PA and Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada. During high school in Canada both he and his younger brother David showed exceptional interest and ability in physics and math. In 1960 Saul-Paul graduated from PBI and soon ended up in Berkeley (Berkeley in the 1960s!) where he continued his science education but also befriended a number of artists and musicians, notably Don Buchla and Charles MacDermed.

Saul-Paul Sirag plus a Hair poster

Energized by 1960s Berkeley, Saul-Paul moved to New York City where he reviewed books, wrote and acted in plays at La MaMa in the East Village, participated in an Andy Warhol Fashion show and, by his own account, inspired a Broadway hit: "Jerry Ragni, who wrote Hair, told me that he got the idea while watching me dance to the Grateful Dead in the East Village." Ah, Saul-Paul Sirag: woolly-headed icon of the Age of Aquarius.

By the early 1970s Saul-Paul was back in Berkeley where he resided at Arthur Young's Institute for the Study of Consciousness (ISC) on Benvenue Street, a kind of boarding house and meeting hall for people interested in the mystery of human awareness. I first met Saul-Paul in 1973 at ISC and was impressed by his uniqueness. Everyone was into Tarot cards at the time but Saul-Paul had created his own private deck, made up of images (including porn) that had significance only to Saul-Paul himself. Saul-Paul was privately schooling himself in math and physics and was writing a popular science column called "The New Alchemy" which was syndicated in college newspapers. ISC was a nexus for people interested in ordinary and altered states. And through Saul-Paul and his friends at ISC I was able to meet many smart people who helped me write my own book on consciousness.

Saul-Paul's room at ISC was stacked floor to ceiling with unusual books. One of my favorite finds in the Sirag scriptorum was a German-language edition of John von Neumann's classic Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics which announces behind the title page: "Copyright Vested in the U.S. Alien Property Custodian 1943, Pursuant to Law." I don't know exactly what this means but it conjures up the image of a famous German physics book seized by the Allies as "spoils of war." ISC was only a few blocks from the UC Berkeley campus. No day spent with S-P was ever complete without a jolly tour of campus bookstores in search of exotic codices. This was before the Internet, when bookstores in Berkeley were as common as pizza shops.

Saul-Paul was a founding member of the Consciousness Theory Group (CTG) which held meetings first at ISC, then later, across the Bay in San Francisco when Saul-Paul moved into Henry Dakin's Washington Research Institute (WRI) where both consciousness and the Soviet Union were central topics of concern. While at WRI, Saul-Paul served as president for a few years of the Parapsychology Research Group (PRG) in which Russell Targ (of SRI Remote Viewing fame) was a prominent participant. While at WRI, Saul-Paul devised an ambitious hyperspace model of consciousness which, unfortunately, only Saul-Paul was able to understand.

A description of S-P's hyperspace model appears in Jeffrey Mishlove's authoritative tome The Roots of Consciousness. Saul-Paul penned the Afterword for Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger and published at least two papers on obscure physics phenomena in Nature, Earth's most prestigious science journal. Saul-Paul has also produced an irreverent and unpublished manuscript about his school days at Prairie Bible Institute entitled Jumped by Jesus.

Saul-Paul Sirag at Esalen Institute (1980 - 1988)

 During the 1980s, Mike Murphy invited Saul-Paul and me to host invitational seminars on physics and consciousness at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The major focus of these seminars was Bell's theorem which proves that if certain quantum experiments are correct, then reality must be "non-local". Bell's theorem is unique in that it is a statement not about experiment nor theory but about "reality itself". Moreover, BT is no mere conjecture concerning the nature of reality but a rigorous mathematical proof.

Many of the participants in the Esalen Seminars on the Nature of Reality were members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group (FFG) founded in Berkeley by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissman as recounted in David Kaiser's recent book How the Hippies Saved Physics.

Saul-Paul was also present at the creation of Sirag Numbers and Siragian Triangles, two small mathematical curiosities with no known real-world application.

Saul-Paul Sirag's New Math Book

Earlier this year (2016) Saul-Paul published a new math book ADEX Theory: How the ADE Coxeter Graphs Unify Mathematics and Physics.

Saul-Paul Sirag and the five Coxeter graphs

ADEX Theory is basically a taxonomy of mathematical objects similar to the classification of life forms on Earth, into fundamental categories such as kingdoms, phylums, classes, genuses and species. All animals, both alive today and in the fossil record, can be organized into only 16 phylums with names such as Protozoa, Anthropoda, Mollusca and Ctenophora. Humans belong to the phylum Chordata along with cats, dogs, lizards, birds, sharks and sting rays. "Possessing a backbone" is the passport to membership in phylum Chordata.

Compared to mathematical objects, life on Earth is easy to classify because life has a common origin and all life forms are members of a single tangled family tree. A mathematical object, on the other hand, consists of any structure whatsoever that the human mind can invent and find interesting. Categorize the human imagination? Impossible.

Saul-Paul describes in ADEX Theory the successful classification of a large variety of seemingly unrelated mathematical objects using only five "mathematical phylums" called Coxeter graphs (after Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter). Here I will confess from the outset that the task of reviewing this book is well above my pay scale. Only a person with considerable mathematical sophistication can truly appreciate ADEX Theory.

What amazes me, as a mathematical pedestrian, is 1. the enormous variety of mathematical objects that can be brought together into a few communal families by this simple classification scheme and 2. the peculiar nature of the five "mathematical phylums" that are able to tame this giant population of unfettered figments of the human imagination.

Get this: the mathematical phylums, called Coxeter graphs, are symbols for something called Reflection Groups which are analogous to a set of mirrors in multidimensional spaces. Each Coxeter graph stands for, if I understand things correctly, a particular KALEIDOSCOPE in hyperspace. So, instead of a backbone, each member of the same mathematical phylum possesses, in some sense, the same brand of kaleidoscope.

And here is a partial list of the variety of mathematical objects which Saul-Paul shows how to classify using just five mathematical phylums (five Coxeter graphs):

1. The Coxeter reflection groups, or Weyl groups

(the objects these diagrams were originally designed to represent)

2. The Thom-Arnold "simple catastrophes" of dynamical systems

(the "butterfly catastrophe" lives in phylum A5)

3. Digital error-correcting codes

(Hamming-8 code lives in phylum E8)

4. Knot and Braid theory

(E6, E7, E8 phylums important for classifying knots)

5. Maximal quantum entanglement of 3 qubits

(related to the E7 phylum)

6. Roger Penrose's "twistor theory"

(twistors live in every ADE phylum)

And that's just some stuff I can almost begin to understand. Saul-Paul goes on to show how ADE phylums can help organize Lie groups, Klein-DuVal singularities, McKay correspondence groups plus Kac-Moody and Heisenberg algebras.

Moving on to more practical topics, the guy that inspired Hair uses ADE to clarify and unite topics in string theory, black hole physics, the holographic principle plus his own rendering of the possible ADE underpinning of our current Standard Model of elementary particle physics.

Oh, and this theory can also help us understand something called "quivers".

This book should appeal to specialists in any of the above-named fields who will appreciate Saul-Paul's passion for these esoteric topics and his fine attention to detail. In a rare literary aside, Saul-Paul shares this: "In his preface to Regular Complex Polytopes, Coxeter wrote: 'Its relationship to my earlier Regular Polytopes resembles that of Through the Looking Glass to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,' This book which Coxeter says he 'constructed ... like a Bruckner symphony' is the most beautiful mathematical book which I possess (among several hundred)."

And you there reading these words now. Which is your most beautiful book?

The author of ADEX Theory lives in Eugene, Oregon with his wife Mary-Minn.

Saul-Paul Sirag at the Eugene, Oregon Ken Kesey statue
plus the first nine Sirag Numbers

My Dinner with John and Mary Bell

Dinner Party chez Pierre and Mary Noyes: March 1988

In his best-selling book How the Hippies Saved Physics, MIT professor David Kaiser describes how the members of an informal, outside-the-mainstream research group in Berkeley (Elizabeth Rauscher's Fundamental Fyziks Group) were able to make significant advances in a then-unfashionable field (quantum foundations) which has since become a respectable and flourishing part of physics.

However, Kaiser failed to mention that along with Berkeley's FFG, a like-minded group at Stanford (ANPA West, founded by Stanford professor Pierre Noyes), was also enthusiastically exploring the once disreputable field of quantum foundations. ANPA (an acronym for Alternative Natural Philosophy Association) was organized by Cambridge physicist Ted Bastin and his friends. The "bible" of ANPA was a collection of essays edited by Bastin Quantum Theory and Beyond which featured papers by David Bohm, Yakir Aharonov, Geoffrey Chew as well as lesser-known quantum-edge explorers). ANPA East was centered in Cambridge while its Western focus was Pierre's group at Stanford.

ANPA West meetings took place mainly in buildings in and around Stanford with an occasional trip into the redwoods to David McGoveran's house in Boulder Creek. The main focus of ANPA West was "bit-string physics"-- the world viewed as a computer program -- and attempting to calculate the value of fundamental constants via a technique called "combinatorial hierarchy". But a glance at the ANPA West Journal (a kitchen-table-top production by Tom Etter and Suzanne Bristol) shows that ANPA West members were also interested in other foundational topics including new quantum logics and Bell's Theorem. [Computer graphics wizard Dick Shoup has scanned and posted all these journals here.]

Physicist Henry Stapp (a prominent FFG member) has called Bell's Theorem "the most profound discovery in science". But despite its alleged profundity, this theorem was dismissed by the majority of physicists as "mere philosophy" and research into its implications was considered to be a "career breaker". For instance, John Clauser's advisor warned him, in effect, that he would never achieve an academic physics position if he persisted in doing a Bell's theorem experiment regarded at the time as an exercise in "mere philosophy".

Clauser's advisor was right -- John never did get an academic post -- but when Bell's theorem finally became fashionable in wider venues than Big Sur's Esalen Institute, Stanford's ANPA West and Berkeley's Fundamental Fyziks Group, John Clauser's trail-blazing work was belatedly recognized with one of the physics profession's highest honors.

Although I had corresponded with John Bell at CERN while writing Quantum Reality, I had never met the author of "the most profound discovery in science". I had one chance to meet Bell in 1982 when Saul-Paul Sirag and I invited him to Esalen Institute in Big Sur to receive (along with John Clauser), The Reality Prize, funded by Charles Brandon, one of the founders of FEDEX. It pleases me no end that of all the awards John Bell has since received (including a Nobel Prize nomination shortly before his untimely death in 1990 at age 62) our Esalen Reality Prize was the very first to publicly honor this extraordinary man. John Bell, however, did not come to Big Sur but instead sent a colleague, Bernard D'Espagnat, to accept the Reality Prize.

John Stewart Bell was my hero. I had spent a lot of time reading his papers, arguing with colleagues about his work and even developing my own bare-bones, stripped-down version of Bell's famous theorem. So you can imagine my delight when Pierre Noyes invited me to his home in the Stanford foothills for a seminar by John Bell and a few days later to a dinner party with John and his wife Mary Ross Bell, also a physicist. (This was in March 1988, only a few years before Bell's death.)

I recall very few details of that dinner in '88, except that for me it felt like sitting in an extra chair at Jesus's Last Supper. In John Bell's presence, I felt that close to holiness. One of the most charming aspects of John and Mary Bell was their Irish accents which lent a particular sparkle to their speech. Both John and Mary were brilliant, witty and entertaining. Our table talk was further enhanced by many many glasses of fine wine produced by Pierre's son David (proprietor of David Noyes Wines in Sonoma). Thank you, Pierre and Mary Noyes, for greatly enriching Nick and Betsy Herbert's lives.

Here's my favorite Bell story from those meetings. It took place in Pierre's living room in Bell's seminar a few days before the luminous dinner. In front of the black board, John Bell was arguing a particular point when a Stanford physicist loudly objected:

"But how can that be, John? Isn't such-and-such true?"

To which Bell replied (and you've got to imagine this delivered in a sparkling Irish accent):

"So ye believe such-and-such, do ye? Well. in three minutes, I'll have ye believin' the opposite."

And then, in less than three minutes,  John Bell proceeded to make good his boast.

Letter to St. Charles

St. Charles Borromeo (1538 - 1584), Bishop of Milan

To Louis Fabro, Director of Alumni Affairs, St. Charles Borromeo Preparatory School, Columbus, Ohio.

As a 1954 St. Charles Borromeo alumnus who moved to California in the 60s, I have been enjoying reading in your newsletters about the changes taking place at my old high school.  After all the new construction, I'm sure I would not recognize the place. A lot of changes have occurred in 60 years including the new pedestrian bridge across Alum Creek near the site of the Mary Grotto where some of us--not me--would sneak behind to smoke cigarettes. Is there still a seminary on the grounds where boarding-school students would steal beer from the novitiate's refrigerators? I remember assisting as an altar boy at morning mass in the chapel when I came early to school. And being castigated by Monsignor Galen in math class which was not so unusual: Msgr. Galen's standards were high and few of us escaped this brilliant man's good-natured criticism.


Responding to your request for material for your Alumni News, here's what's been happening to Nick.

After graduating from St. Charles, I got a BA in physics from Ohio State and a PhD in Physics from Stanford.

I held various jobs in industry during the 60s and 70s, then dropped out of the mainstream to home school my son Khola and do physics at home--a decision which introduced me to many other independent researchers working at the edges of conventional science. During this time I wrote three books, the best-selling Quantum Reality, still in print and ebook, Faster Than Light, and Elemental Mind, a book about consciousness. In the late 70s, I was invited to teach and lead seminars at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA on the implications of Bell's Theorem, a new mathematical proof by Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, concerned not merely with experiments, nor with theories but with "reality itself". Two of my achievements in this area were the shortest proof of Bell's theorem and a thought experiment (called FLASH) which led directly to the discovery of the quantum No-Cloning Rule, a fundamental fact of nature that sets limits on the behavior of quantum computers. My work was recently publicized in MIT professor David Kaiser's popular book How the Hippies Saved Physics and in Supernature, a soon-to-be-released feature-length film by Jeffrey Kripal and Scott Hulan Jones dramatizing the 50-year history of Esalen Institute. I live in Boulder Creek, CA with my cat Onyx, work out twice a week, have published two books of quantum-erotic poetry and am learning to play the Irish whistle. Not such a bad life for a boy both of whose grandfathers were immigrants from the Ukraine who worked as coal miners in South-eastern Ohio. See what a difference a St Charles education can make!

Nick Herbert, St Charles Borromeo, Class of 1954

It's Wrong But It Feels So Right

Sketch of FLASH device in Scientific American

If you live long enough, some of your old deeds may come back to haunt you.

In this month's Scientific American (June 2012), science historians David Kaiser (How the Hippies Saved Physics) and Angela Creager (The Life of a Virus) describe two scientific proposals that were totally wrong but led to new and unexpected discoveries. In "The Right Way to Get It Wrong", AC describes biologist Max Delbrück's failed attempt to develop techniques for deciphering the genetic mechanism of viruses--techniques that were successfully applied by other biologists to understand the reproduction not of viruses but bacteria. DK describes my own failed attempt to develop a superluminal communication device I called FLASH (First Laser-Amplified Superluminal Hookup).

Irish physicist John Bell had proved a famous theorem in the 60s about reality--that reality must be "non-local."--that is, connected together faster-than-light--in order to explain the results of a simple quantum optical experiment of the EPR (Einstein-Poldolsky-Rosen) type. But despite Bell's discovery that Quantum Reality must be FTL, other theorems existed (e. g. Eberhard's Proof) that Quantum Facts must always be local. In other words, Nature must use FTL connections to accomplish her quantum miracles but these underground FTL channels were off limits to human beings.

But certain physicists with time on their hands could not resist the temptation to attempt to design devices that used Nature's forbidden FTL channels for human superluminal signaling. I and a few others devised such devices but all of them were easily refuted. Except one--the FLASH device.

The key to superluminal signaling rests in the ability to distinguish a beam of random plane-polarized photons (Horizontal and Vertical) from a random beam of circularly-polarized photons (Right- and Left- circular). Simply put, any device that can determine the polarization of a single photon is all you need to signal FTL.

FLASH attempts to measure the polarization of a single photon by sending that photon thru a Laser Gain Tube which (presumably) operates like a xerox machine. Having many copies of the same polarization, it is easy to determine whether a photon is H, V, R or L. If you can xerox photons you can signal FTL--and also build a time machine.

To prevent chronological disaster, the FLASH device had to be wrong. But where was the error? After some debate behind the scenes, a number of theoreticians discovered the flaw which was first revealed in a paper in Nature by Wooters & Zurek entitled "A Single Quantum Cannot Be Cloned". Thus was born the now-famous "quantum no-cloning rule" which guarantees the security of quantum cryptography and makes it impossible in the field of quantum computing to copy a quantum data set--quantum data is intrinsically copy protected by Nature herself.

As a little-known sequel to the FLASH drama, I recently concocted another FTL signaling device whose refutation leads to another brand-new law of Nature "A Pair of Quanta Cannot Be Wed". At present my "quantum no-wedding rule" has found absolutely no practical application anywhere.

There are probably many more examples where a wrong turn led to an unexpected new discovery. Almost certainly the biggest mistake in history must be Christopher Columbus's exploratory voyage to discover a new route to India--and his massively inept misnaming of the inhabitants of that newly discovered land.

September Events

Nick contemplating the Sirag Numbers

First of all, I would like to thank all the peeples dat remembers my birthday this year. And thanks for the many sweet birthday gifts including the opportunity to handle an 1895 Winchester 45-70 rifle

On Sunday, Sept 18, Nick will be the Featured Reader at Poet/Speak, a monthly event hosted by Poetry Santa Cruz. Reading will occur at 2 PM at Santa Cruz Main Library Meeting Room, 224 Church St. Santa Cruz, CA. Open Mike signup. A rare chance to experience quantum tantra live.

On Tuesday, Sept 20, MIT professor David Kaiser will describe his new book "How the Hippies Saved Physics" at the University Club in San Francisco from 6 to 9 PM. Some of the "hippies" will be present for interrogation including Jack Sarfatti, Fred Allen Wolf and Russell Targ. $25 including refreshments. For more info contact Michael Sarfatti at sarfatti@alum.mit.edu.

The Sirag numbers have been partially tamed! Mark Buchanan and Dick Shoup produced a list of SN up to 2995 from which Saul-Paul Sirag extracted several quasi-periodic interval pattern of period 32. From Saul-Paul's data, Nick Herbert constructed this morning the basic equations that all Sirag numbers must satisfy. The Herbert equations classify all Sirag numbers as Primary SNs or Secondary SNs. For the Primary SNs the Herbert equations generate true Sirag numbers. For the Secondary SNs, the Herbert algorithm generates true Sirag numbers but also false ones. However the Herbert classification is exhaustive--any true Sirag number will be generated by one of the Herbert algorithms.

The Primary Sirag numbers (SPs) fall in two classes, Even and Odd. Their defining algorithms are:

SE(n) = 12 + 32n where n = 0 -> N

SO(n) = 12 + 32n - 25 where n = 1 -> N

The Even Sirag numbers SE(n) repeat with a period of 32 beginning with the first Sirag number J*(1) =12. The Odd Sirag numbers SO(n) repeat with a period of 32 beginning with J*(3) = 19. Thus the primary Sirag numbers are represented by two superposed periodic sequences separated by the interval "7". These two equations generate true Sirag numbers but fail to generate ALL SIRAG NUMBERS. For instance J*(2) = 15 is not a member of SO(n). J*(2) is a Secondary Sirag number (SS).

The Secondary Sirag numbers (SSs) fall into four classes--SS3, SS4, SS12 and SS13. These SNs are generated by the four equations:

SS3(n) = SO(n) - 3

SS4(n) = SO(n) - 4

SS12(n) = SE(n) -12

SS13(n) = SE(n) - 13

Any Sirag numbers will be found to be described either as a SP or a SS. Thus this classification is exhaustive. The first set of equations (SPs) can be used to generate Sirag numbers; the second set (SSs) are useful only for classification--some of the numbers generated are not true Sirag numbers.

As an example of this classification scheme we can now recognize J*(2) as SS4(1). The famous Sirag number "1939" representing the year of Saul-Paul's birth turns out to be the Primary Sirag number SO(61). Does the largest computed Sirag number "2995" belong to one of these sets?

The skeptical reader may wish to check Herbert's claims by testing to see if any Sirag number refuses to be pressed into one of these six classifications.

Herbert's equations for the Sirag numbers are a generalization of Saul-Paul's discovery that the intervals between consecutive Sirag numbers are dominated by "7"s and "25"s. And that these intervals are further haphazardly divided into sub-intervals "3 + 4 = 7" and "12 + 13 = 25". And these intervals are the ONLY INTERVALS that appear. No pattern has yet been discovered in the distribution of subintervals, Hence the present lack of an algorithm that will generate all Sirag numbers.

Now shout it from the rooftops:

The Sirag Numbers are (partially) tamed!

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

How the Hippies Saved Physics

In June 2011, W. W. Norton is scheduled to publish a book by MIT historian of science David Kaiser entitled How the Hippies Saved Physics that describes some of the colorful events and characters who researched the foundations of quantum physics in the 60s, 70s and 80s. These out-of-the-mainstream scientists focused their attention mostly on Bell's Theorem (published the same year that the Grateful Dead emerged on the scene) and quantum entanglement--topics which today form the basis for the emerging fields of quantum computing and cryptography.

Frankly speaking, How the Hippies Saved Physics is a book about me and my friends who were not interested in quantum experiments, who were not interested in quantum theory, but instead passionately involved ourselves in the quest to connect with QUANTUM REALITY itself. And we hoped that Bell's Theorem--which is a THEOREM ABOUT REALITY ITSELF--would help us reach our goal to conjugate with Mother Nature at a far deeper level than mere theory or mere experiment can provide. In short, my companions and I fell in love with Bell's Theorem and wholeheartedly took Her Lure. And with loving detail Professor Kaiser tells our tale.

Kaiser's account of our psychedelic drug use, however, is greatly exaggerated. For the most part we "hippies who saved physics" (including the shy, reclusive Jack Sarfatti) used drugs only when necessary to accomplish the task at hand (as well as in primitive courtship rituals).

Kaiser's video may be viewed here.