Nick Gets a Spiral CAT Scan

Nick after release from Dominican Hospital

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

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

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

Nick wrist-tagged at Space Station Dominic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Map of human circulatory system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From "thecatscan.tumblr.com"

Quantum Theology

The Holy Trinity: Three Persons in One God

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

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

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

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

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

Priest in Philadelphia turning bread into the Body of God

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

QUANTUM THEOLOGY

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

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

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

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

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

The GHZ experiment: Three photons in one entanglement

The Kalamidas Experiment

Nick calculating the Kalamidas effect (NKE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about the Kalamidas choice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My conclusion?

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

Sketch of the original Kalamidas experiment (OKE)

Demetrios! the Opera

Bruce Damer auditioning for Demetrios! the Opera

DEMETRIOS! THE OPERA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO VALENTINES

Nick's Knot by August O'Connor

TWO VALENTINES


OM'S LAW

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


VALENTINE 2013

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

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

KISS -- a New Superluminal Communication Scheme

Demetrios A. Kalamidas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sketch of the KISS proposal (from JOSA article)

Ode to Bruce Eisner (1948-2013)

Bruce Eisner (1948-2013)

ODE TO BRUCE EISNER (1948-2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiencing Quantum Reality

EXPERIENCING QUANTUM REALITY

Nick's achieved the impossible feat ---
Weaned himself from the Classical Teat
Now he knows where it's at
With Schrödinger's Cat
But needs help in crossing the street.

See also:
What is Reality?
Quantum Realism and Quantum Surrealism
Quantum Magic Confirmed
How to Quantum-Entangle Human Beings
A Book About Reality.

What is Reality?

Nick consults his Quantum Reality bible

Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory of the physical world that mankind has ever possessed. Its domain is the entire physical world -- from the tiniest quark to the largest neutron star -- and wherever it can be tested, it has never been wrong.

However the spectacular successes of quantum mechanics comes with a steep philosophical price -- use this theory, give up "reality".

What does it mean: "give up reality"? Certainly the world itself still exists and quantum mechanics excellently predicts the results of all experiments we can imagine doing in this world. This world seems "real enough" and we now have immense control over it. What more could one ask?

What one could ask is a "plausible story" that tells us "what's happening" in the world. One could ask "Behind all the fancy mathematics what's really going on in the quantum world?" And to this "reality question", quantum theory conspicuously fails to give an answer. In graduate school the classic answer our teachers gave to the quantum reality question was effectively "Shut up and calculate."

What better question with which to begin the New Year -- What is Reality? And who better to ask than a conference of physicists gathered together in a former monastery on Lake Traunsee in Austria to discuss "Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality".

To assay the current opinions among quantum physicists regarding the Nature of Reality, physicist Anton Zeilinger and a few colleagues devised a multiple-choice test whose results they recently published in the physics arXiv.

The major result of this poll was the immense disagreement between these experts about questions having to do with "what's really going on" in the world. Two of the most popular realities were Copenhagen Interpretation (42%) and Many-Worlds Interpretation (18%). But of course Nature is not democratic and her reality is not determined by a popularity contest.

Some time ago I wrote a book about Quantum Reality describing some of the many possible stories that physicists have invented to describe what really might be going on behind the mathematics. Although many subtle and beautiful experiments have since been carried out to probe "reality questions" -- many of them carried out by the authors of this survey -- the question is still very much up in the air. When I wrote that book, physicists were confused about the nature of reality. What this poll shows is that even after many quantum-reality-probing experiments we are still confused, but now our confusion is deeper than before.

Happy New Year 2013

Nick face-to-face with the Mystery

It's customary at the beginning of the New Year to review the events of the Year Past. And Quantum Tantra Blog with its nose in the future and its ass in the past is no exception. The year 2012 witnessed many innovations some of which were recorded in this web journal, others of which were too personal, too complex or too unspeakable to put into words.

In Quantum Tantra 2012, I recorded three of the most profound experiences of my life — a near-death experience with fellow Stanford physicist Chuck Buchanan on Mt Shasta, a meeting with a discarnate "Angel" in Berkeley long before I had even heard of psychedelics. And a first contact with the Galactic Telepaths triggered by smoking half a joint of very low-grade 60s-quality marijuana.

Year 2012 was a very creative period for Nick. He self-published Harlot Nature, a new collection of quantum-tantric poetry and performed (for pay!) in a small Irish band called Blarney. Lots of new poetry got published here, including Happy YIDD, In Fourteen Other Star Systems, Kiss My Bare Art, Greatest Pleasure, Quantum ABCs, Happy Doomsday, No Holocaust/No Big Bang and First Contact.

On the literary front, 2012 celebrated the publication of Richard Grossinger's magnum opus on consciousness, the three-volume Dark Pool of Light, to which Nick Herbert and Jeffrey Kripal each contributed prefaces. Sci-fi impresario Rudy Rucker reprinted (in both print and ebook) the amazingly unappreciated psychedelic classic Be Not Content by William Craddock. Nick added another original Feghoot story to the canon. And the Quantum Tantric Most Twisted Story of 2012 Award goes to James Worrad's sublime Eye-High published in Rudy Rucker's überbizarre online zine Flurb.

2012 marked the 10th anniversary of my wife Betsy's death which I memorialize here.

And then a film crew invaded the sanctity of Nick's Quantum Tantra Ashram to capture more scenes for Supernature, a movie-history of Esalen Institute in which myself and Saul-Paul Sirag played a small but essential part.

On top of this, Australian multimedia artist Lynden Stone was inspired by my Metaphase Typewriter — a quantum-based language generator Nick devised in the 70s as a possible physical channel to discarnate beings (reported in some detail in David Kaiser's best-selling How the Hippies Saved Physics). Lynden conceived the Metaphase Revival Project and reproduced Nick's Metaphase Typewriter (using modern ready-made hardware rather than starting from scratch as I did in the 70s) as an Art Project which she exhibited as artist-in-residence from Queensland at Philadelphia's Crane Gallery as Encounters with Quantum in conjunction with conceptual artist Jon Keats's equally innovative Quantum Marriage — a brand-new human linkage ceremony based on quantum entanglement.

On my own creative front, besides publishing Harlot Nature and a new Feghoot story, Nick presented interim results of his long-term project to expand the number of body chakras — to 48, a seven-fold extension of the 7 classical chakras. Nick also discovered that half-baked proposals for faster-than-light signaling schemes based on "over-complete, non-orthogonal bases" could be directly tested on the simplest version of quantum teleportation which produces such base states naturally as a consequence of the Hilbert-space dimensionality asymmetry between Alice and Bob — the conventional would-be FTL signalers — whose instruments are linked by a quantum-entangled photon pair.

As a finale to the year 2012, Nick discovered YIDD — a brand-new Ukrainian feast day. And for dessert (Happy New Year!) published a little known argument by physicist Erwin (the Cat-in-the-Box man) Schrödinger purporting to prove the existence of God.

Happy New Year to all my friends. May this new year be full for you of many happy surprises.