Alternative to Marriage

"I've come to New York to introduce an alternative to marriage." --Jon Keats

With five millennia of history, and a plethora of religious and civil ceremonies, marriage is a popular means of producing families. Yet matrimony isn't the only method of uniting people, nor even is it the most effective technique. Modern science suggests a far more profound alternative, one that does not operate by religious tradition or civil mandate, but rather bonds couples by a law of nature: quantum entanglement. More here.

With Usura

Mug Shot: Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

For an exceptional back-in-time experience -- to hear Ezra Pound reading his own work --- visit the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound Ezra Pound Page. Grander than the Beatles and performing without a back-up track --- EZRA POUND LIVE! --- the poet himself chants With Usura in this mp3 recording. An extraordinary man raising his solitary voice against the enslavement of men and women by economic institutions, Pound's old-fashioned words ring as soundly today as a quark explosion in the Large Hadron Collider.

Ezra Pound
Canto XLV
WITH USURA

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that delight might cover their face.

WITH USURA
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luz
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision.

WITH USURA
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly.

WITH USURA
sin against nature
is thy bread ever more stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour.

With usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Stonecutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom.

WITH USURA
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand
and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning.
Pietro Lombardo came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin’ not by usura
nor was La Calunnia painted.
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
No church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.
Not by usura Saint Trophime
Not by usura Saint Hilaire,
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling.

Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsy to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom.

CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

[And so that you don't continually misunderstand. Usury and interest are not the same thing. Usury is a charge made for the use of money regardless of production and often without regard even of the possibilities of production. I now repeat the theme in Canto LI.]

Quantum Magic Confirmed

Alexander Klyachko, the "K" in the KCBS inequality

Quantum mechanics, the most powerful theory of the material world that humans have ever possessed, comes with a heavy price--the renunciation of knowing what is really going on in the world. Use this theory, give up reality. And perhaps the most peculiar fact about the quantum reality mystery is that it's hidden in plain sight. The quantum math is clear, complete and unambiguous; we can calculate with perfect precision exactly what will happen in any experiment that we can imagine. So even though we cannot visualize what's happening "behind the scenes" of the phenomena that we observe, we can use the theory itself to constrain any model that we might wish to construct about the "reality that exists beneath the quantum facts." The results of such indirect reasoning about deep reality have been posted. The conclusion: quantum reality is "magic".

Physics is all about making measurements. But quantum theory says that for every measurement you might like to make (say position) there is a COMPLEMENTARY measurement (in this case momentum) whose accuracy is disturbed by the first measurement. The existence of complementary pairs of observables is an entirely quantum feature not present in classical physics. But for most quantum systems, one can often pick out a set of "compatible observables",  that can be measured without mutual interference. Such measurements form a kind of "classical sector" in the full quantum realm, and one might suppose that the reality underlying this classical sector could be explained using classical concepts.

The Kocken-Specker theorem, published in 1967, proves this supposition to be false. Even the classical sector of quantum physics cannot be explained by an underlying classical reality. It can only be explained by "magic". Simon Kocken tried to evoke the flavor of this "quantum magic" in his "Parable of the Over-protective Seer".

In ancient Nineveh there lived an ingenious wizard-astrologer whose beautiful daughter was besieged by many suitors. To prevent his daughter from marrying an unworthy man, the wizard devised a "suitable suitor" test. On a table in the royal interview room, the wizard placed three jewel boxes. The suitor's task was to state "FULL" or "EMPTY" and then select the two boxes that confirmed his prediction. If, for instance, the suitor said "FULL" and both his chosen boxes contained jewels, then he could claim his princess bride. Dozens of men attempted the test--with precisely the same result. Whatever pair of boxes a suitor would choose, one always contained jewels, the other turned up empty. 

Since there is no way that anyone can fairly prepare three boxes, without two of them being either full or empty, pure logic suggests that the seer used "magic"--some sort of trickery--as part of the "reality" behind his test.

Quantum theory is strange but not strange enough to build such boxes. However Simon Kochen (an American mathematician) and Ernst Specker (a Swiss mathematician)--using the same sort of reasoning that proves the fictional seer must use magic--proved that the quantum world must use a similar "magic", even in its "tame" classical sector, to produce its quantum facts.

[In technical terms, the K-S theorem proves that, even in the classical sector, where all measurements "mutually commute", no NON-CONTEXTUAL REALITY can underlie the quantum facts. In a non-contextual world what box I choose to open (what measurement I choose to make) does not affect the contents of the other boxes (does not affect the outcome of other compatible measurements.) This may sound subtle--and indeed it is. But this is REALITY that K&S are talking about--not mere phenomena. And any knowledge we might gain about reality is certainly worth paying attention to--knowledge about reality being infinitely more precious than jewels in some mad wizard's box.]

K&S's original proof was exceedingly complicated. It involved a diagram with 117 "rays". Their proof was simplified by Asher Peres to 36 rays, then to 18 rays by Adan Cabello, then to 8 rays by Rob Clifton.

Recently Vladivostok-born Alexander Klyachko entered the frey. Klyachko (a visiting math professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey) devised a proof of the K-S theorem using only 5 rays. Moreover he expressed his proof in the form of a testable inequality (the KCBS inequality).

If a physics experiment obeys the KCBS inequality, then you don't need "magic" to explain it.

However if a physics experiment violates the KCBS inequality, then (by reasoning of the kind that exposed the seer's trickery) the reality behind that experiment must be "magic".

Klyachko's 5-ray proof works for the smallest quantum system (a spin-1 particle) that satisfies the K-S postulates, so his demonstration will no doubt enter the record books as the most concise proof of the existence of "quantum magic". Nature is full of spin-1 particles, but to do complex experiments on such particles is devilishly difficult. Recognizing the practical difficulties of testing his KCBS inequality on actual spin-1 systems, Klyachko cleverly devised an equivalent physical system composed of two photons in the same spatial mode (the so-called "biphoton") that possess exactly the same external quantum properties as an actual spin-1 system.

Inspired by Klyachko's work, Radek Lapkiewicz and colleagues in Anton Zeilinger's lab at the University of Vienna recently prepared a similar optical analog to the spin-1 particle using the considerable resources of modern quantum optics. The LLSLRWZ collaboration tested the KCBS inequality and demonstrated that the inequality was violated. Hence reality has to be contextual. Reality cannot be modeled by ordinary classical concepts. Reality, in short, must be "magic".

In light of this blog's tantric theme and the parable of the magic jewel boxes, one is tempted to suppose that, like Simon Kochen's over-protective seer from Nineveh,  Mother Nature might be using "quantum magic" to prevent adolescent apes with plutonium from tinkering with reality's deep primordial innocence.

Some secrets may be only suitable for grownups.

The Lapkiewicz et al test of KCBS inequality in Vienna

Kubla Khan

Dr. Jabir's KUBLA KHAN: a modern version of Samuel Coleridge's celebrated Pleasure Dome poem conceived during an opium vision--Coleridge's setting it down in writing cut off abruptly by a visit from some anonymous "person from Porlock". Could Jabir in his dervish trance have recaptured in this short video a few of Coleridge's lost stanzas?

Today's the 3rd birthday of this Quantum Tantra blog. This year I added "tags"--a kind of crude table of contents--for more convenient exploration of older posts.

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

Esalen SuperSymposium IV

Meditation Hut: Esalen Institute (photo by Judy Tart)

Rice University scholar of religion Jeffrey Kripal (Authors of the Impossible: the Paranormal and the Sacred, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom) in his recent authoritative history of Esalen Institute has characterized Esalen as a center for "western tantra" and as seeking to promote "a religion of no-religion". One outstanding feature of traditional religions is the notion of superpowers, allegedly possessed by gods, angels, saints and miracle workers. Kripal is interested in superpowers too and, under the auspices of the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, has convened three SuperSymposia on superpowers at Esalen, examining how non-religious superpowers have been portrayed 1) in science fiction, 2) in superhero comics and 3) in metaphysical films such as The Matrix.

This month Jeffrey convened a fourth SuperSymposium on "Superpowers at Esalen", to examine investigations of deep reality that were either initiated or fostered at Esalen, including extraordinary performance in sports, "miraculous" healing and unusual bodily phenomena, mystical, psychedelic and other altered states, nonlocality (''voodoo connections") in quantum physics, reincarnation, mediumistic communication with the dead, ESP and other psychic phenomena, as well as some "miscellaneous maybes"--that defy ordinary categories.

Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy has had an abiding interest in extraordinary sports performance and bodily transformations. Golf in the Kingdom, Jacob Atabet, The Future of the Body and In the Zone: Transcendent Experiences in Sport are a few of Murphy's books on the expanded body. Besides exploring extraordinary body states, Mike and his wife Dulce have initiated several programs in citizen diplomacy. Their reciprocal visits with Boris Yeltsin and other Russians could arguably be said to have contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. This year Esalen is sponsoring similar citizen exchanges between the US and China and a Middle East exchange program called The Abrahamic Family Reunion. At this SuperSymposium, Mike and Dulce recounted many stories about their Russian adventures including tales of interactions with US presidents, CIA and KGB agents as well as with many, many ordinary Russian citizens.

Reinforcing the Murphys' accounts of their adventures in the Soviet Union, cultural scholar Birgit Menzel, from Mainz, Germany. shared her own research on Russian folk culture, focusing on the Russian mystical tradition of shamans, wandering monks and holy fools as well as describing her studies of contemporary upwellings of esoteric spiritual practices in Russia since the fall of the communist state.

Don Hanlon Johnson (Body: Recovering our Sensual Wisdom) a pioneer in the field of Somatics, gave examples of remarkable experiences that can occur during deep massage. Don travelled to Russia with the Murphys, his education as a Jesuit priest giving him privileged access to Russian priests and monks. During our time together, Don Johnson introduced me to two "proofs" of the existence of God by St Thomas Aquinas, that my teachers in high school had failed to impart.

Religious scholar Dana Sawyer drew from his many trips to India, studying and meditating with the Dandi Sadhus, a sect of Hindu Swamis in the Vedanta tradition, to speak of his encounters with various Indian holy men. The bulk of Dana's presentation centered on the life and thought of Aldous Huxley, an influential Western intellectual (Brave New World, Island, The Perennial Philosophy, Doors of Perception) who was strongly influenced by the version of Vedanta he learned from Swami Prabhavananda while the Huxleys were living in Los Angeles. Sawyer, the author of a well-received recent biography of Aldous Huxley, described the role that psychedelics and Eastern philosophy played in Aldous's thinking not too far from one of Esalen's main meeting rooms, named "Huxley" in honor of the part that Huxley played in coining the phrase "human potential" and in inspiring the directions that Esalen would take in its formative years.

Stan and Christina Grof (LSD: Doorway to the Numinous, Spiritual Emergency) talked about psychedelics, spiritual emergence through mental breakdowns and their own way of inducing altered states through Holotropic Breathwork. For more than a dozen years, Stan and Christina were scholars in residence at Esalen, and, like Aldous Huxley, had much to do with shaping Esalen's character. I especially enjoyed sharing time with Stan whom I first met at a conference in Iceland in 1972.

Psychologist Charles Tart (The End of Materialism) and physicist Russell Targ (Limitless Mind: a Guide to Remote Viewing) presented examples of "superpowers" from the field of parapsychology. Russell gave examples of successful remote viewing experiments with untrained subjects, related many remarkable stories of the achievements of talented remote viewers (such as ex-police chief Pat Price), and showed films of psychic experiments with Uri Geller and details of his research on remote viewing at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA.

Nick Herbert explains quantum non-locality in Esalen's Big House

Physicist Nick Herbert (Quantum Reality) introduced the group to the "quantum physics code"--Dirac bra-ket notation-- and described two modern "superpowers"--quantum superposition and quantum entanglement--powers possessed by many quantum systems but not even describable in an ordinary world made of "things".

Physicist Elizabeth Rauscher (Orbiting the Moons of Pluto), who has worked with Russell Targ on remote viewing experiments at SRI, presented her model of eight-dimensional spacetime that attempts to make sense of the mind's apparent ability, in certain special situations, to transcend the limits of ordinary four-dimensional experience (3 of space and 1 of time).

In the Wednesday night presentation in "Huxley room" attended by Esalen staff and seminarians, Elizabeth described her founding and hosting at the Berkeley Radiation Lab of a study group that eventually grew to become "the hippies that saved physics", as chronicled in a brand-new book by David Kaiser, professor of science history at MIT. Nick Herbert explained "quantum non-locality" as a kind of invisible physics voodoo, unveiled for the first time in the Esalen community his conception of "quantum tantra", and then ranted in public about something he called "tantric jihad".

Adam Crabtree (From Mesmer to Freud, Trance Zero) is a Toronto psychotherapist and expert on the history of hypnotic induction. He is a charter member of Esalen CTR's long-running Survival Seminars and along with Ed and Emily Kelly is the editor of Irreducible Mind. Ed Kelly is a research psychologist whose current interest is the study of altered states using modern neuro-imaging techniques.

The currently fashionable philosophy of reductive materialism holds that mind is entirely a production of (yet to be discovered) physical processes in the brain. Irreducible Mind by Kelly, Kelly, Crabtree et al is a collection of experiments and experiences which suggest that the mind is more than the brain. And this book of inconvenient facts is 800 pages long. Like Galileo's critics who shunned his telescope, many scientists will refuse to open this book. But the world left Galileo's critics behind and they missed the chance to surf one of intellectual history's biggest waves.

Scott Hulan Jones, an independent film maker, is producing a feature-length film based on Jeffrey Kripal's Esalen: America and the Religion of No-Religion. As part of that project, whose working title is Supernature: the Story of Esalen, Jones and Richard Lacey recorded all of SuperSymposium IV on high-quality digital video. Watch for it soon at a theater near you.

In my mind's eye, the participants at Esalen SuperSymposium IV

Cats of War

Tiger Jones, Special Forces, Normandy Beach 6/6/44

Slate Magazine: Cats of War

CIA: Project Acoustic Kitty

Foaming in Stout Beers

Stout beer, chips and salsa plus a foam-enhancing plastic "widget".

Three physicists walk into a bar. They've just read a new paper from the University of Limerick Foaming in Stout Beers and want to test its hypotheses first hand. "By Henry's Law, this Guinness should not foam," says one. By Fick's Law, the making of the froth will be too slow for a good head," says the second. "And by Laplace's Law," exclaims the third, "the bubbles should not form at all!" Yet our barmaid has drawn us three excellent pints with fine creamy heads. "It's a bloody miracle," they all shout and order another round.

Foaming in Stout Beers by William Lee and Michael Devereux introduces the paradox of stout beers. Unlike regular beers, champagne and soft drinks which are pressurized with carbon dioxide, stout beers are pressurized with nitrogen gas which contributes to the unique taste and creamy head of Guinness and other stout beers. But nitrogen is 50 times less soluble in water than carbon dioxide which hinders the foaming that so enhances the beer-drinking experience. To force draught Guinness to foam, the tap is fitted with a special nozzle. Stout in cans and bottles is foamed by a gas-injecting plastic "widget".

The lads at Limerick have authored a paper which tells you more than anyone should be allowed to know about the secret life of stout. Here is their webpage and here is the abstract of their mathematical analysis of how bubbles form in stout and other delightful drinks:

We review the differences between bubble formation in champagne and other carbonated drinks, and stout beers which contain a mixture of dissolved nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The presence of dissolved nitrogen in stout beers gives them a number of properties of interest to connoisseurs and physicists. These remarkable properties come at a price: stout beers do not foam spontaneously and special technology, such as the widgets used in cans, is needed to promote foaming. Nevertheless the same mechanism, nucleation by gas pockets trapped in cellulose fibres, responsible for foaming in carbonated drinks is active in stout beers, but at an impractically slow rate. This gentle rate of bubble nucleation makes stout beers an excellent model system for the scientific investigation of the nucleation of gas bubbles. The equipment needed is very modest, putting such experiments within reach of undergraduate laboratories. Finally we consider the suggestion that a widget could be constructed by coating the inside of a beer can with cellulose fibres.

Another round of the dark stuff to be honorin' William Lee, Michael Devereux and Scott McKechnie.

From Jesus and Mohammed comics

Tantric Jihad! the text

Dream of the Believer by Achille Zo

TANTRIC JIHAD!
(video version posted here)

The pious Muslim bathes himself
Prostrates five times from dusk to dawn
Submits himself to Hidden Mystery
That can be neither named nor drawn.

At home Omar recites 

the verse of Rumi and Hafeez

And when Fate cuts short the little life he leads
He'll rule a harem full of virgins--

at least ten times seven

Or so the editors of Time 

would have us all believe.

To me a few score virgins seems so paltry
We're talking about heaven after all
Where absolutely nothing is impossible
And anything you wish--it will befall.

So here's a tantric Challenge of Two Cultures
Here's one place 

where West and East come home.

Can you invent a sexier heaven then the Muslim?
Can you design a more voluptuous pleasure dome?

O Western he-man, show us your hottest fantasy
What turns you on so much you've got to scream
And sophisticated Western woman also
Step forth, show off your deepest sexual dream.

And Eli Lilly, Sandoz, Merck and Pfizer 
Please motivate your captive PhDs
To invent new sex drugs so hot and pleasurable
They'll even bring Dick Cheney to his knees.

Challenge our Western artists, 

cooks and courtesans,

Physicists, tailors, engineers and dharma bums:
Dream us a heaven, we can build it.
If we can build it, they will come.

Rise up. creative friends, WAGE TANTRIC JIHAD
Unleash your deepest dreams of heart's delight
We'll show 

those benighted Grandsons of the Prophet

What a truly joyful Western paradise is like.