A Nobel Prize for Nick

For years I've been experimenting with new ways to formulate and publicize the goals of Quantum Tantra, the as-yet-unrealized, explosively brand-new science of the future. Recently I ran across an early attempt to popularize Quantum Tantra in the form of a Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Here is that world-shattering speech in its entirety.

Happy Birthday, Quantum Tantra Blog!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

This day marks the second anniversary of Quantum Tantra blog. It's been a busy year which saw the publication of a baker's dozen of Nick's love poems to Mother Nature, as well as the publication of more hot poetry from muse-inspired friends in my own community and the wider world including bard-master supreme D. H. Lawrence.

This year also witnessed the production of a handful of short videos including a two-minute Wagnerian opera (URGE: a short opera about reality) released on Valentine's Day 2010 plus a cartoon animation (Benjamin Bunny Faces Reality) by the late Randy Hamm about the reality behind quantum mechanics. Also the performance of our Irish session band at Santa Cruz lawyer Patrick Reilly's St Patrick's Day party was captured on video.

I am a compulsive reader and have chosen here among the dozens I have devoured this year a few books that merit special attention including my own Quantum Reality-- to which Amazon reviewers have awarded 4-1/2 stars as the book that explains the world's quantum mysteries more clearly than any other book in the world. For every copy sold, a buck goes to the Quantum Tantra Ashram to keep my pantry stocked with meat, Guinness and cat food.

Speaking of quantum physics, last year I happened upon a new law of nature--the quantum no-wedding theorem. And this year My Sweetheart Muse gave me a great birthday gift, called NICK'S THEOREM, that puts quantitative limits on psychic powers--the first instance, to my knowledge, that physics concepts have been used to constrain the powers of the mind. Also in the physics realm, I describe here Four Preposterous Devices which purport to bridge the elusive border twixt mind and matter using concepts imported from quantum physics.

Sadly, a number of deaths occurred this year. In QT blog, I publicized a few, left others for private mourning. Persons memorialized here include my good friend and explorer Earl Crockett (1938-2010); George Leonard (1923-2010), chief mainstay of Esalen Institute, and my wonderful late wife Betsy Rose Rasumny (1938-2002). The departure from the physical plane of these three individuals has left holes that nobody can ever fill.

On a happier note I was pleased to congratulate friend and colleague, John Clauser, on his being awarded the Wolf Prize for experimental work on quantum entanglement. Recently the New York Times featured gym buddy Bruce Damer in its tech pages for his development of the EvoGrid, a massively parallel computer simulation of artificial life. Also this blog was able to recount two of the exploits of the notorious Ferdinand Feghoot: One. Two.

Also appearing this year is the story of Nick & Betsy's move to Boulder Creek more than two decades ago; Scientific American columnist (1914-2010) Martin Gardner's classic essay "Is Realism a Dirty Word?"; a series of mathematical postage stamps "Ten Equations That Changed the World"; the most recent upgrade of my "Tantric Table of the Elements" and a short photo essay by Reno DeCaro: "Egad! It's an iPad!"

A few of the quantum tantra high points of the past year are cataloged below. If you find this sort of thing entertaining, educational and/or enlightening, I encourage you to browse the site for more posts in the same style.

Happy Second Birthday, Quantum Tantra Blog! (Loud cheers. Free intoxicants. Wild music. Frenzied dancing. Fireworks. Speaking in tongues.) Thank you all for coming. Now to suitably kick off Quantum Tantra Blog's Year Three, I intend to publish next something really special: Nick's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Happy New Year, Quantum Tantra Blog! (Deafening smashing of preconceptions and the beginning of a new era of human relations with the Universe.)

NICK'S POETRY (QUANTUM TANTRA YEAR 2):
1. What Do Men Want?
2. Natura Naturans
3.Harlot Nature
4. Jabir Meets Earth's Underlords
5. Hanukkah Song
6. Elements of Tantra
7. Meta-docs on Duty
8. Submit to Walt
9. Praise to Ichthos
10. LSD is the Hubble
11. 99 Names of Goddess
12. The New Sex Robot
13. Lifting the Veil of a New Sensual Science
plus bonus link to an older broadside called Jailbait.

POETRY OF OTHERS (QUANTUM TANTRA YEAR 2):
The Day the Saucers Came by Neil Gaiman
The Man Who Fell for the Universe by Len Anderson
Eyes by Bonnie Eskie
In These Five Remaining Days by Kathleen Flowers
Boulder Creek BistroScene Era (1992-2007)
Whoreson Crawl by Ladislaw Tzestrczyk (aka John Greeley)
The Joyce of Hemp by Walt Bachrach
Antarctica by Patti Sirens
O Taste and See by Denise Levertov
Moonrise by D. H. Lawrence

VIDEO SHORTS (QUANTUM TANTRA YEAR 2):
URGE: a short opera about reality
Benjamin Bunny Faces Reality
St Paddy's Day Session Band
A is For Allah by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)
Tantric Jihad! the Video
Just Like at Nuremberg by Rico Youngblood
Quantum Tantra by Kelly Evans

BOOK REVIEWS (QUANTUM TANTRA YEAR 2):
Time Slave by John Norman
Women by Charles Bukowski
Quicksilver by Neil Stephenson
The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder
Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert

What do Men Want?

from Japanese EIZO X-ray pinup calendar

WHAT DO MEN WANT?
DOES SHE DO VULCAN MIND MELD
ON THE FIRST DATE?

I want your bra size, baby
Fax number, E-mail address,
Modem com code, ID,
Phone machine access.

Give me your thumb print, password,
Blood type and credit check;
Give me your antibody spectrum;
Give me your human genome specs.

Wanna tweak your web site, blog and Twitter,
Poke your Facebook's Google maps;
Sniff your panties while I'm running
Telepathic Apple iPhone apps.

Let's break bread together, baby,
Exchanging cryptographic primes;
Let's connect our pores and USB ports
Let's do high-speed, broad-band, real-time.

Velcro'd at the chakras
Let's circulate our chi;
Let's indulge in covalent bondage;
Let's communicate in C.

I wanna swim in your gene pool, mama;
Snort up your pheromones close range;
Tune into your neurotransmitters;
Introduce you to Doctor Strange.

I wanna surf your quantum potentia;
Mess with your thermostat;
Wanna tour your molecular orbitals;
Wanna feed your Schrödinger cat.

Let's surgically merge our organs:
Our kidneys, our lungs, and our hearts;
Let's read physics journals together
And laugh at the dirty parts.

Let's Bell-connect our bellies
With some quantum-adhesive glue;
Let's do new stuff to each other
That Newton never knew.

Wanna feel your viscosity, honey
Dissolve my categorical mind;
Let your female force field vectors
Deform my male spacetime.

Let's dance at warp speed, dearie
Go back before B. C.
We'll dress in period costumes
And make love to our family trees.

Bill for a Birth

(click to expand)

While searching in my archives for photos to illustrate MIT History of Science professor David Kaiser's upcoming book (tentatively entitled How the Hippies Saved Physics) I excavated many Paleolithic layers of personal history including this bill for my birth in a homeopathic hospital in Pittsburgh, PA.

The services for which the hospital billed my parents are itemized thus: "Flat rate for 12 days room and board, delivery room, anesthesia, laboratory tests, routine medicines, care of baby included."

The total bill? $40.00.

Of course I was born in the middle of America's Great Depression, when forty dollars was a lot of money.

Harlot Nature (2)

Night on Pandora (from James Cameron's Avatar)

Saddened by BP corporation's
hemorrhaging oil
into life-filled waters
of Gulf of Mexico,
I'm reposting this lament.


HARLOT NATURE

I have heard that Nature's a harlot

Legs open and flat on Her back

That She's naked, unbridled and shameless

And prone to unnatural acts

And prone to unnatural acts.

Can I smother Your prairies with asphalt?

Can I murder the fish in Your seas?

Can I milk all the oils from Your body?

Can I make You make money for me?

Can I make You make money for me?

The hungriest whore has her limits

Every prostitute minds her taboos

Is Nature a slut without scruples?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

Can I shit in the veins of Your body?

Can I suck all Your aquifers dry?

Can I strip off Your beautiful jungles?

Order more of Your species to die?

Order more of Your species to die?

The hungriest whore has her limits

Every prostitute minds her taboos

Is Nature a slut without scruples?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

How to Quantum-Entangle Human Beings

One of the first instruments for directly observing single quantum events was the human eye. A device called the spinthariscope, consisting of a phosphor screen and a lens, allows a human eye to see flashes of light caused by individual charged elementary particles impacting on the phosphor screen. The now-obsolete cathode ray tubes worked by transforming the impact of high-speed electrons into bright flashes of light on a phosphor screen. Many of the early physics experiments on alpha-particle scattering (including Nobel Laureate Ernest Rutherford's experiment that first determined the structure of the atom) were carried out by human eyes working long hours counting light flashes on phosphor screens. These naked-eye detectors have long since been superceded in physics by ingenious electronic means of registering charged particles and photons, down-grading the unsophisticated spinthariscope to the status of a toy.

Recently however, physicist Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva have revived interest in the human eye as a detector of light. The modern field of quantum optics has allowed physicists to produce many varieties of "unnatural light", including "squeezed light", "sub- and super-Poissonian light", "Fock state light" as well as "coherent" and "entangled" light. So far all of this "lux contra natura" has only been observed by electronic photon detectors but Gisin et al are now considering for the first time to involve the human eye in these quantum measurements.

Gisin's proposal has inspired wild speculations on the Internet about the possibility of "quantum entangling human beings" by allowing a pair of people to simultaneously observe unnatural forms of light.

Similar speculations concerning the deep entanglement of human beings by exposing their retinas to unusual forms of light were posed earlier in this blog in the context of devices called Stellerator and Lunerator.

Like the motto of Star Trek, the very essence of science is to boldly go where no man has gone before. Most likely deep human entanglement by simple retinal exposure to unnatural forms of illumination will turn out to be a pipedream, but, in science, experiment will always trump speculation.

Gentlemen (and ladies) our scientists have created for your pleasure several astonishingly new forms of light.

Please enter our Geneva light lab, wait your turns, then simply open your eyes.