Verse & Universe

Happy New Year 2015 !

Browsing through the Capitola Library on Christmas Eve, I came across a real gem. It's a big anthology of poetry about science and math called Verse & Universe. The poetry is mainly by non-scientists, taking the material of science as their inspiration. John Updike's justly famous poem about neutrinos is included but none of my own verse -- not even the eminently anthologizable Physics For Beginners. I am enjoying this big book in small bursts as if eating a box of chocolates. Reading this anthology is a good way for a scientist to begin the New Year, to appreciate so many fresh new perspectives on the craft of doing science. So far, having gobbled up only about 40 pages of the 300 plus in the box, my most favorite poem is one by Serbian-American Charles Simic which I reprint here:


MADONNA TOUCHED UP WITH A GOATEE

Most ancient Metaphysics, (poor Metaphysics!)
All decked up in imitation jewelry.
We went for a stroll, arm in arm, 
                                 smooching in public
Despite the difference in age.

It's still the 19th century, she whispered.
We were in a knife-fighting neighborhood
Among some rundown relics 
                      of the Industrial Revolution.
Just a little further, she assured me.
In the back of a certain candy store 
                                 only she knew about,
The customers were engrossed in 
              the Phenomenology of the Spirit.

It's long past midnight, my dove, my angel!
We'd better be careful, I thought.
There were young hoods on street corners
With crosses and iron studs 
                           on their leather jackets.
They all looked like they'd read Darwin 
                             and that madman Pavlov,
And were about to ask for a light.

No Torture Please

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor

NO TORTURE PLEASE

"Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz 
OKs torture in USA" -- New York Times

Torture Dershowitz, not me
I'll tell you all I know
Of freedom-hating terrorists
And poisoned H2O.

Here's what I'll say if tortured
So you can skip the rack
No shock machines: I'll spill the beans
And never answer back.

I'll finger all conspirators
Turn in my mom and fadda
Don't torture me -- here's what you need:
Al Dershowitz is al Qeadda.

Could lawyer's guise conceal a spy?
Is Al the man behind our troubles?
Is Dershowitz the terrorist
That turned our Towers into rubble?

At first he will deny the charges
But the truth is near at hand
For Harvard profs respond to torture
More smartly than the common man.

He'll confess to kissing Satan
While his testicles are fryin'
Al engineered the Holocaust
And wrote the Protocols of Zion.

Torture Dershowitz, not me
Barbarism's not my diet.
Is Dershowitz so fond of torture?
Then let him be the first to try it.

Abduction by Aliens

Dr Future Show at http://www.drfutureshow.com/

Allan and Sun Lundell (also known as Doctor and Mrs Future) host a radio show every Tuesday in which they interview folks working (and playing) at the edge of science, technology and consciousness. A few days ago they convened a Conclave of Mad/Glad Scientists at a secret beach house location in Rio Del Mar, CA. Most of the scientists invited to the Conclave had appeared on the Dr Future Show and included people demonstrating Russian hand-held electro-vibratory healing devices, brain stimulating machines, light-pattern projectors; people claiming channeled and otherwise inspired visions of the future and reports from Amazon explorers concerning ayahuasca-mediated connections to the Mind of Nature. Musicians, singers (including the remarkable Caroluna) and splendidly-inventive cooks added spice to the Mad/Glad Conclave.

Nick Herbert attended mainly as a spectator, expecting at most to be goaded into battle against some champion of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis of which he had recently expressed his reasons for skepticism over the airwaves on the Dr Future Show.

But instead, during a break in the stream of speakers, Nick was called to the stage and asked to do whatever he pleased. He obliged by recounting his Abduction by Aliens story which was captured by Dr Future on video and posted on YouTube.

Later, away from the food, the drink and the music, away from the buzzy touch of the Russian healing machine, away from the rushing buzz of the responsive audience and presenters, Nick and Al slipped outside, walked across the sand, took off their shoes and renewed their age-old connection with the sea.

The New Physicality

June Jordan (1936-2002)

Poem Number Two on Bell's Theorem
Or the New Physicality of Long Distance Love

There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.

----June Jordan

June Jordan's marvelous little poem is one more piece of art inspired by Bell's Theorem. Just in time for the Queen's College exhibit in Belfast, Ireland which closes Nov 30: Action at a Distance: The Life and Legacy of John Stewart Bell.

Salvia Divinorum

 

From Bill Tavis tumblr

WHERE SHE TAKES ME



it starts suddenly with a circle


circular motion


a sense of movement


going counterclockwise


and it feels 


it feels like it comes


out of my mouth


out of my forehead


the left side of my face


a scatter pattern


a pattern


a scatter


left to right


a pull and circularity


around me above me 

from me


inside a huge room


a cathedral


I am both


the inside and the outside


and I don't know


I don't know how


I don't know how to


move


or swim


through this space


and I keep thinking


its growing


growing out of my face


out of my body


spinning


out of my body


and wondering


where my body


is


I want to relax


just wonder


at the beauty


of it all


and part of me 


is saying


where am I


not as in what is this place


where is this place


but


where is my body


because its 


pure consciousness


without


any physical sense


and I feel like I


should be inside


this space I've created


instead


I


am


the


space


and this time it is pastel green


but another time it was


pink luminescent light


and its made of


me


its made of


my face my body


repeating


over & over & over & over &


like a patchwork 


or finely woven fabric


and it would be peaceful


except for me


wondering 


where my body's gone


and if it will ever come back


or will I ever find my way back




so I let go and swim and


it's huge


it's vast


it's cavernous


and afterwards


there is this 


deep profound


sense of


regret


because I couldn't 


stay 


longer


this place I have always


wanted to be


this place I have always


looked for

-- by Laura Pendell

Salvia Divinorum from Erowid

Bell's Theorem Blues

Irish physicist John Stewart Bell (1928-1990)

 During the month of November the Naughton Museum at Queen's College in Belfast, Ireland, is hosting events and exhibits related to one of their most famous alumni, Belfast-born physicist John Stewart Bell. The festival is entitled Action at a Distance: the Life and Legacy of John Stewart Bell. The director of the museum, Shan McAnena, contacted me for advice and as a possible exhibitor. Her exhibits were to be centered not around physics but on art inspired by John Bell's work. Shan was interested in me not for my books about quantum physics, nor for my published papers on Bell's theorem but for something I wrote long ago as a joke.

In my book Quantum Reality which describes attempts to conceptualize quantum theory in human understandable terms, I write a lot about John Bell and his famous theorem. During this book's progress I exchanged letters with this brilliant physicist and Bell even wrote a blurb for Quantum Reality (along with Heinz Pagels and Isaac Azimov). Finally at the end of the book I included a song that I wrote that summed up Bell's Theorem in a nutshell. This song Bell's Theorem Blues was what Shan McAnena wanted to include in the Queen's College tribute.

A bit about Bell's Theorem and why it is so extraordinary: Most accomplishments in physics are either about theory or experiment -- some new piece of mathematics that explains the facts or some new piece of machinery that permits us to measure those facts. Bell's Theorem however is neither about theory nor about experiment but about Reality Itself. It is very unusual to find a sane person that attempts to speak coherently about Reality Itself. But Bell not only spoke about Deep Reality, he actually MATHEMATICALLY PROVED something important about this invisible nature which lies beneath everyone of our theories and experiments. Bell's accomplishment is unique. I challenge you to find another human being in the history of human thought who has produced anything even close to what this astonishing Irishman has done.

And what was the physics community's response to Bell's remarkable achievement? His physics colleagues either ignored Bell's work (which was initially published exactly 50 years ago in a new and obscure short-lived little journal called Physics). Shortly after it was published, physicists either ignored Bell's Theorem-- or dismissed it entirely as "mere philosophy".

Fifty years later, the importance of Bell's Theorem is generally recognized and has inspired work in quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and many aspects of physics that employ quantum entanglement. (Part of the story of Bell's Theorem's rise from obscurity to stardom is told in David Kaiser's book How the Hippies Saved Physics.)

So I wrote this song as a joke at the end of my book. In one of his last videoed physics lectures at CERN in 1990, organized by Antoine Suarez, Bell actually shows off the text of Bell's Theorem Blues to an audience of physicists. But Bell quickly adds  "I'm not going to sing it." Bell merely quotes it. In his Irish accent.

Boulder Creek Blues Trio: Galt, Bowers and Rush

The Belfast museum required a song, so I persuaded my favorite local musicians to perform this little bit of musical physics. One Sunday morning in October at pianist Jack Bowers's Santa Cruz, CA, studio, the Boulder Creek Blues Trio consisting of Joy Rush (vocal), Jack Bowers (piano) and George Galt (harmonica) transformed for the first time my words on paper into a musical quantum number. You can hear Bell's Theorem Blues here (full lyrics plus an audio file). Sheet music, an mp3 recording and a video of the recording session were shipped to the Naughton Museum in Belfast to be presented as "art inspired by Bell's Theorem". Here's the first verse of Bell's Theorem Blues:

Doctor Bell say we connected

He call me on the phone

Doctor Bell say united

He call me on the phone

But if we really together, baby,

How come I feel so all alone?

A young John Bell on his Ariel Motorcycle

Here's the BBC report on the Belfast celebration and here's an account of the honoring of John Bell by the Royal Irish Academy. Several researchers whose work was inspired by Bell's Theorem are giving public lectures at various Belfast venues. A motion to name a street in the Titanic quarter after Bell was denied by the city council because of their policy not to name streets after people. As a compromise the city fathers voted to name the street Bell's Theorem Crescent, possibly the only street in the world named after a mathematical theorem. The City of Belfast also designated Nov 4 as "John Bell Day" to commemorate that big day 50 years ago when John Bell published his famous proof which demonstrates that reality is non-local.

Belfast City Hall illuminated in rainbow colors to honor John Bell.

The Aphrodite Award

Nobel Prize Medal: Alfred Nobel & Science Unveiling Nature

THE APHRODITE AWARD

Each year a few win Nobel Prizes
And a few win the grand Golden Gloves
But of all the awards this society affords
How many prizes are given for love?

Why not honor your very first crush?
And the first time you kissed in the dark?
The first time you actually "did it"?
And the first one who shattered your heart?

With whom did you first 
do THIS crazy thing?
And with whom did you actually 
first attempt THAT?
Why not honor your own 
personal best sparring partners?
And give medals to your love's 
own champ diplomats?

As the audience applauds
As the musicians soar
You announce your own picks
For the Grand Prix d'Amour

For the Award of Aphrodite
and of the lesser muses
Who taught us love's delights
And the body's pleasant uses.

Be generous in giving out trophies and prizes
For unforgettable lips and sensual surprises.
Praising much what thou lovest well
You shall be your own Nobel.

Always a Reckoning: a Review

Life on a Killer Submarine by Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko

Last week at the Live Oak Library on Corcoran Lagoon I discovered a Charles Bukowski book I had not yet read (War All the Time) and right next to it on the shelf I found this remarkable collection of poetry Always a Reckoning. The author was a Navy lieutenant in the US submarine fleet under Hyman Rickover "who goaded us to reach for higher dreams and duties than the mediocre". Of his life inside a nuclear sub, this military poet wrote:

LIFE ON A KILLER SUBMARINE

I had a warm, sequestered feeling
deep beneath the sea,
moving silently, assessing
what we could hear from far away
because we ran so quietly ourselves,
walking always in our stocking feet.
We'd listen to the wild sea sounds,
the scratch of shrimp, the bowhead's moan,
the tantalizing songs of humpback whales.
We strained to hear all other things,
letting ocean lenses bring to us
the steady, throbbing beat of screws,
the murmurs of most distant ships,
or submarines that might be hunting us.
One time we heard, with perfect clarity,
a vessel's pulse four hundred miles away
and remembered that, in spite of everything
we did to keep our sounds suppressed,
the gradient sea could focus too, our muffled noise,
could let the other listeners know
where their torpedoes might be aimed.
We wanted them to understand
that we could always hear them first
and, knowing, be inclined to share
our love of solitude, our fear
that one move, threatening or wrong,
could cost the peace we yearned to keep,
and kill our hopes that they were thrilled, like us,
to hear the same whale's song.

This warrior bard was a poet of place like Carl Sandburg: his place was not Sandburg's Chicago Midwest but America's rural South: many of his poems describe a boy's Huck-Finn-like experiences growing up in a society where racial segregation was the law of the land. Like Sandburg, his poems show him to be an perceptive student of nature, including the nature of human beings. The poet also became a Southern politician and wrote about that too:

My First Try for Votes by Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko

MY FIRST TRY FOR VOTES

Uneasy in my first campaign,
I feared the likely ridicule,
but got up nerve and neared
some loafers I saw shooting pool.

I caught the eye of an older man
who seemed to know who I might be.
When I went up to him to speak
he cocked a bleary eye at me.

"Now wait, don't tell me who you are,"
he shouted out. I stood in dread.
Bystanders paused. I blabbed my name.
He frowned. "Naw, that ain't it," he said.

Politician poet was a family man. He wrote love poems to his wife, rhymed affections to his father, to his friends and to his dog (some included here). And his grand-daughter Sarah Elizabeth made line drawings to illustrate each of her grandfather's poems.

This family man was also a diplomat, mediating conflicts in every continent except Antarctica: his world-wide arbitrations earning this diplomat poet a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. A philanthropist as well, this poet worked successfully to reduce disease in Africa, to provide affordable housing to the poor and to fight injustice and inhumanity in his own country and elsewhere in the world.

Not only his words but his deeds as well prove this warrior/diplomat/family-man to be one of the most thoughtful, high-minded and moral figures of his day -- all these character traits (and this man's modesty too) clearly shine through his poetry. Reading these simple yet skillful verses, one is left to wonder, in such an amoral and barbaric nation as our own, how such a noble and high-minded man as this warrior poet could ever have been elected president of the United States.

Sex

The Consequences of Decision by Jacob Livengood

SEX

(for Henry Stapp
who once conjectured
that consciousness is our reward
for collapsing the wave function.)

Could sexual cravings explain the equations
Of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born and Dirac
Is it sex that bedazzles the great Milky Way?
Is it sex that explains why quarks interact?

Sex that's animalistic
Sex that's deeply dirty and raw
Sex that feeds on Quantum Reality
Sex that fucks with Natural Law.

The hottest mystery in physics is this:
Out of what conceivable gateway
Do fresh new realities spring?
O World, please lead me to quantum temptation
Could "how matter gets real" be a sexual thing?

Sex that's subtle, sex that's delicate
As a single photon of light
Sex that tentatively fingers the Darkness
And, finding it good, impregnates the Night.

Innocent and uninhibited
By the ignorance of today
Sex that's teasing us to discover
How this Universe wants to play.

Neville's Brain

Although Neville's brain was in a state of superposition, he was, when fully probed, a naive realist. Lynden Stone 2014

Lynden Elizabeth Stone is an Australian visual artist who explores the richness and ambiguity of existence using metaphors derived from quantum physics. I first met Lynden in the context of her Metaphase Typewriter Revival project where she reproduced with modern technology a nutty old experiment of mine put together at the dawn of the computer age that explored the conjecture that elemental quantum randomness might be used by spirits, both embodied and immaterial, to communicate in human language if a suitable computer interface were provided.

Lynden recently came to America as an artist in residence at Crane Galleries in Philadelphia where she exhibited the revived metaphase machine and other work concerning the ambiguity of existence. She just now completed her PhD at Griffith University in Queensland for a thesis entitled Doubting Conventional Reality: Visual Art and Quantum Mechanics in which she surveys contemporary visual artists who are using quantum-physics metaphors in the visual arts -- including her own work in this arena.

Part of Lynden's PhD thesis included a public exhibition of her work. She asked me to contribute some program notes for this show and promised me "an original art work" in exchange. A few days ago I received in the mail a pizza-box-sized package that contained Lynden's art work Neville's Brain.

In one simple image Lynden invokes several famous physicists beginning with the image of the Moon in the upper left corner. Lynden renders this moon in lenticular photography which was invented by British physicist David Brewster (who also invented the kaleidoscope). In the present context the moon image also suggests Einstein's famous quantum question to physicist Abraham Pais: "Do you really believe that the Moon does not exist when nobody looks?".

The black-and-white background of Lynden's piece consists of distorted Greek letters "psi" which is the symbol for the wavefunction in quantum theory. Neville's superposed brain is reminiscent of the "Wigner's Friend paradox" in quantum mechanics as well as John von Neumann's conjecture that when humans observe a superposed quantum system, their brain states should also turn into superpositions.

The fact that Neville is a naive realist despite his superposed brain summarizes the basic quantum conundrum of why the world always appears "classical" despite the fact that physicists can prove that the world is entirely "quantum". Today, the real mystery is not quantum mechanics; the real mystery is why the world appears to humans to be stubbornly classical.

JUJITSU UNIVERSE

We house-broke quantum reality

Taught Schrödinger's Cat to purr

Now daily life's as uncanny

As atoms ever were.

At the bottom right is the fuzzy sketch of an animal which might possible represent the famously ambiguous Schrödinger Cat. Except that Lynden's animal looks just like a dog.

Thank you, Lynden Stone, for this rich and original work. I will treasure it like a quantum Picasso.

Erwin's Puss by Lynden Stone, housed at Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

The Heart of Aikido

LInda Holiday Sensei, Aikido of Santa Cruz

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

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

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

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

Journey to the Heart of Aikido

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anno Sensei and Linda Holiday Sensei

Work in Progress

Work in Progress 2014

WORK IN PROGRESS

Come for the lunch
And stay for the tantra:
Taking new chances
In life-and-death dances
With creatures
That you barely know.

Come for the truth
And stay for the magic:
Share drugs and kisses,
Hesitations, near misses
With seekers
You meet in the flow.

Come for the sex
Stay for quantum reality:
Learn tricks of attention
In half-sensed dimensions
From teachers
Whose lessons explode.

Nick Emits Antimatter

Nick emits: 1 positron every 12 seconds

Fausto Marcon recently drew my attention to a blog post  by "tertiary source" entitled What's the Antimatter Content of a Banana? .

I guessed "Zero" but I was wrong.

I know that bananas are radioactive because they contain a lot of Potassium. And some of that Potassium exists as Potassium-40 (K-40), a long-lived radio-isotope left over from the creation of the Earth. But I had imagined, that K-40, like most naturally occurring radio-active substances, emitted beta and gamma rays which are just high-speed electrons and high-frequency light. In other words, ordinary matter -- just a bit more highly excited than the matter in your lipstick and in your coffee cup.

And that's for the most part correct.

But if you look up Potassium-40 in Wikipedia (which can be trusted on subjects as uncontroversial as the properties of atoms), you will find that this isotope possesses three separate decay modes. And that one of these decay modes involves the emission of a positron (or anti-electron) which is a fundamental particle with the same mass as the electron but with opposite charge. The positron is the simplest example of "antimatter" with the property that when an electron (matter) meets up with a positron (antimatter) both particles disappear in a flash of light (gamma rays) -- a process aptly named matter-antimatter annihilation. The positron was the first anti-particle discovered (by Carl Andersen in 1932) but every known particle has an antimatter partner, all of whom (I believe) have now been detected.

So along with a bunch of ordinary radioactivity, a banana emits antimatter as well, at a rate "tertiary source" estimates to be about 1 positron every 75 minutes -- or about 20 positrons per day.

But my body is filled with Potassium too. And I weigh a lot more than a banana. How much antimatter does Nick emit per day?

Let's face it. Everybody emits radiation whether they are aware of it or not. The main bodily radioisotopes are Potassium-40 and Carbon-14. If you are of average height and build, your radioactive Potassium will produce about 5000 decays per second while your radioactive Carbon produces 3000 decays per second. Much of this radioactivity is absorbed by the body but some escapes and can be detected by a sensitive radiation detector.

Though no fault of your own your body is radioactive.

During the past 60 seconds, the Potassium and Carbon inside your body have produced nearly 1/2 a million radioactive decays. But only a small fraction of these half-million decays are made of antimatter. The body's positron emission rate is about 5 per minute.

A banana takes about 75 minutes to create a single positron, but Nick emits antimatter every 12 seconds.

Nick emits antimatter every 12 seconds.

And so do you.

Detour John

Quantum Physicist or Outlaw Biker?

Several years ago my friend Fred McPherson and I carried out a monthly Dump Run Ritual. We'd get up early, put on our old clothes, load up Fred's pickup truck with trash, brush and garbage from both our homes, then drive to the outdoor dump in Ben Lomond where we would empty the truck and hung out with other dumpers and scavengers. Afterwards we would return to Boulder Creek to eat lunch and drink beer at Adelita's Mexican restaurant -- alas no longer in business -- which served the best chile rellenos in Santa Cruz county.

As we pulled into Adelito's parking lot we noticed a cluster of newly arrived bikers who belonged to one of the local outlaw motorcycle clubs and who seemed to share our taste in Mexican food. (Such clubs were plentiful in Boulder Creek in the old days, but today a guy on a Harley in Boulder Creek is more likely to be a manager at Apple than a Hell's Angel from Oakland.) These guys in the lot were the real thing, not Angels I think but some local gang like Ghost Riders from Lompico.

The bikers watched our truck pull up. And then the biggest, hairiest and most decorated of these Black Knights of the Road slowly walked over to my side of the car. I had no idea what to expect as this Levi-jacketed berserker stared me right in the eye and reached for my door handle.

Suddenly the big biker stopped and laughed. "Excuse me," he said. "I thought you were somebody I knew." Then he turned and sauntered back towards his pack. "Hey, come back here," I shouted to his retreating form, no longer puzzled about his purpose. When he turned in our direction, I asked him what was the name of the guy that I reminded him of?

"Detour John," said the biker and rejoined his crew.

I really like the name.

And it amused me immensely that Nick Herbert could be mistaken in Boulder Creek for an outlaw biker. But most of all, I was pleased that somewhere in this marvelous world there exists an outlaw biker whose name is Detour John and who looks like a quantum physicist from Stanford.

Speaking of quantum physics, Nick just co-authored a physics paper on a special class of faster-than-light signaling schemes. John Cramer (University of Washington, Seattle) came up with an original idea for an FTL signaling scheme that involves polarization-entangled photons interacting with a novel beam-spitting device -- a device which I dubbed the "Cramer wedge". At first, it looked as though this wedge could robustly accomplish its intended job, and that FTL signaling was indeed within our grasp. However soon John and I were able to show to our satisfaction, that when the operation of this wedge is correctly calculated, all signaling effects vanish. Our paper entitled "An Inquiry into the Possibility of Nonlocal Quantum Communication" is scheduled to be published in Foundations of Physics journal. A preprint of this work is available today on the ArXiv.

I was honored to be asked by John Cramer to take time out of my busy life to collaborate with him on this paper. I was glad for the chance to work with a famous physicist on a new FTL scheme that I had never before encountered.

Thanks for the engaging detour, John.

Illustration from the Cramer-Herbert paper on subtle FTL communication schemes

Allahphone

GIF art from Fall into Fade

ALLAHPHONE

Suzi's hooked on meditation
Brian speaks to God on grass
Sufi Sam's a Whirling Dervish
And Brenda levitates at Mass.

Nature broadcasts night and morning
From every atom, leaf and bone
A trillion voices fill the Cosmos
But most are deaf to allahphone.

Go some place where humans aren't
Take an animal along
Allow yourself to deeply listen
Can you hear Dame Nature's song?

Nature broadcasts noon till midnight
From every rivulet, star and stone
A roaring wisdom fills the Cosmos
But most are deaf to allahphone.

A Question for Men

The Melting Kiss by Awer

A QUESTION FOR MEN

When she whispers
In the midst of the mystery:
"You can do anything you want with me."
What do you actually do?

========================
See also Harlot Nature.
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Burning Man 2014

Burning Man 2014 -- the Playa after the rain

The Burning Man Festival, held every year at Black Rock desert near Reno, Nevada, is the closest thing in our modern God-is-Dead Era to a religious pilgrimage to a sacred site. Burning Man is reminiscent of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in which Geoffrey Chaucer describes the adventures of a group of pious English pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury cathedral near the end of the 14th Century.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages)
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimage.

In modern English:

When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought into the root and all
And bathed every vein in sweet liquor with power
To generate therein and sire the flower...

And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage.

"Then longen folk to go on pilgrimage". Not in April as in Chaucer's Tale. But in early September, just before the autumnal equinox, tens of thousands of people drive out to the middle of an empty desert to create their own temporary Canterburys, Stonehenges and Ka'abas on the sands of the Black Rock Playa. Burning Man still awaits its description at the hand of a Chaucer-class bard. But in lieu of that yet-to-be-famous Black Rock poet, my friend and neighbor, Bruce Damer, PhD, traveled to Burning Man this year to give a few talks and to take lots of photos which he has been sharing with his friends.

Here's Burning Man 2014 through Bruce's eyes. Thank you, dear Doctor Damer, Our Man in the Playa, for recording some fragment of this modern-day pilgrimage for the enjoyment of us stay-at-homes.

May the spirit
of Blessed Sasha Shulgin
be with you
as we mine new magic
out of the old mystery.

Some kinda impromptu temple in the desert?

A shrine to fallen members of the tribe

Homage to Sasha Shulgin who passed away this year

Burning of "The Embrace"

The Destruction of the Temple

Doctor Bruce himself performing at Burning Man 2014

Quantum Vampire Effect

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

Quantum mechanics is full of subtle and unusual processes that challenge our common-sense understanding of the world, for instance simultaneous particle/wave behavior, quantum non-locality, quantum entanglement and instant quantum teleportation. Now, thanks to four Russian researchers in Moscow and Calgary, Canada, a new example of quantum weirdness has been added to the list, the peculiar phenomenon called Quantum Vampire Effect (QVE).

Ilya Fedorov, Alex Ulanov, Yury Kurochkin and Alex Lvovsky announced the discovery of the Quantum Vampire Effect in a recent ArXiv post. Here I will attempt a brief description of the four Russians' discovery.

Quantum Vampire Effect: Removing a photon from part of a state removes the photon from the entire state.

The picture above illustrates an INTERFEROMETER, one of the physicist's most sensitive measuring devices. It works like this. A quantum state ψ at the left is split into two parts by beam splitter BS1 and then later recombined at beam splitter BS2. If the two paths suffer no change, the state ψ re-emerges intact. However if one of the two paths is perturbed by even the most minuscule change, reconstruction fails and some of the state ψ will end up in detector A.

Possible changes that might hinder the perfect reconstruction of ψ include changes in the density of the air, vibrations of the mirrors caused by a car passing outside or by people talking in the room. The INTERFEROMETER is a very very sensitive device.

So now we take this change-sensitive INTERFEROMETER and remove one photon from one of its paths by means of a weakly-transmitting mirror and a single-photon detector (see above). What do you think will happen? The answer to this question is the basis of the Quantum Vampire Effect.

What happens if we remove one photon from one of the beams is NOTHING. Well not exactly nothing, but almost nothing. The original state is preserved at the final detector; sensitive-change-detector A does not click. But the final state is missing one photon.

The final state is missing one photon. This means that taking ONE PHOTON from the PARTIAL STATE (one of the two beams into which the original state was split) is entirely equivalent to taking ONE PHOTON from the ENTIRE STATE. As far as the final result is concerned, the photon-eating device (weakly-transmitting mirror and detector) in partial beam φ1 could just as well have been placed at the beginning of the experiment where it would grab a photon from the whole beam instead of just a part.

In physics slang this photon-grabbing device is the material realization of the "photon annihilation operator" (symbolized by lower case a) which removes one photon from the associated quantum state. If operator a is applied to partial beam φ1 , this operation is written a(φ1). If the full state ψ has one photon removed, this photon removal operation is written a(ψ). The Quantum Vampire Effect amounts to the discovery that under very general conditions:
 

a (φ1) = a (ψ). 

That is, taking a photon from part of the state is exactly equivalent to taking a photon from ALL OF THE STATE.

So what?

Here's what.

If ordinary light absorption worked this way, objects would not cast shadows (hence the Dracula-inspired name). Instead the light as a whole would be dimmed.

The Quantum Vampire Effect does not cast a shadow but reduces the intensity of the light as a whole.

Ordinary Optical Absorption is much more complicated than the simple removal of one photon at a time by physical application of the annihilation operator "a". The realization of "a" is a DIP & CLICK operation which rarely happens in real life but is easy to do in an optics lab. What you do is DIP a mirror into the beam. And if you happen to catch a photon, your detector CLICKS. The Quantum Vampire Effect illustrated above can only be demonstrated if you throw away all ordinary absorptions and just keep the few chance events associated with DIPS & CLICKS.

But however artificial the Vampire Effect might seem, it has enormous philosophical import because it is a concrete example of an action on the part being equivalent TO THE SAME ACTION acting on the whole. One more little puzzle piece in the Great Quantum Mystery.

And perhaps the key to a brand-new super technology. If an action on a part can instantly affect the whole, can one perhaps use the Quantum Vampire Effect to send signals faster-than-light (FTL)?

Since I have been devising impromptu FTL signaling devices for most of my physics career, it was not difficult to see how to exploit the Quantum Vampire Effect to achieve ultra-fast telegraphy.

The trick is this: to start with a quantum state that possesses very few photons, so that the hyper-holistic DIP & CLICK operation results in an enormous change. For this purpose, the best input state one could imagine would be a 2-photon state. Then the DIP & CLICK operation would maximally switch the state (non-locally?) from a state consisting of two photons (symbolized |2>) to a state consisting of just one photon (symbolized |1>).

Accordingly, my new FTL design consists of a 2-photon Diagonally-polarized (D) input state which is split by a polarized beam splitter (PBS) into a Vertically-polarized (V) beam sent to ALICE and a Horizontally-polarized (H) beam sent to BOB.

For starts the initial D beam possesses two photons, which in each pulse are shared between ALICE and BOB. If ALICE detects two photons, BOB detects none. If ALICE detects one photon, BOB gets one too. And so on.

But now ALICE introduces a DIP & CLICK machine into her beam which locally removes one photon from her beam. But according to the Quantum Vampire Effect, Alice's act is NOT ONLY LOCAL BUT GLOBAL. Suddenly instead of sharing a two-photon D state, both ALICE and BOB are sharing a one-photon D state.

And these two kinds of state are easily distinguishable -- mainly by the utter lack of any two-photon counting events.

Is this it? Has the fair Muse of Physics finally delivered Nick his long-sought FTL signaling scheme? Please read on.

VLAD: a proposed FTL signaling scheme based on Quantum Vampire Effect

I decided to call it VLAD (for Vampire-Licit Ansible Device) -- "Ansible" being a famous fictitious FTL signaling device invented by sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin.

And sure enough it works. The above illustration shows the VLAD scheme, including ALICE'S use of a partially-reflecting mirror to DIP & CLICK single photons out of her beam and record every such events with her "a Detector". ("a", you will recall, stands for the quantum photon annihilation operator).

For the VLAD setup, the Quantum Vampire Effect works as advertised: when nothing is done, the input is a two-photon state. But whenever ALICE snatches a photon from her local beam, the ENTIRE SYSTEM acts as though the input was just one photon all along.

The two equations accompanying the drawing represent the quantum wavefunctions for these two cases. 1. When there are two photons in the starting state, ψ(1) describes the situation; 2. When there is only one photon in the starting state, ψ(2) is the correct description.

VLAD "works" in the sense that BOB could easily distinguish which of these two wavefunctions describes the situation by looking at the pattern of photon counts at his detector. VLAD "works" in the sense that ALICE can select, by deploying her DIP & CLICK device or not, whether the wavefunction shall consist of two photons (ψ(1)) or of only one photon (ψ(2)).

But, alas, VLAD finally fails to work after all, because the output of ALICE'S DIP & CLICK occurs at random. Only if Alice sends BOB a signal (at light speed or slower) whenever her "a detector" clicks, can BOB know for sure that that he is looking at a one-photon state. Absent news of ALICE'S "a detector" click, BOB sees no change whatsoever in his pattern of photon clicks. Even through ALICE'S action has randomly embedded a one-photon pattern in the full photon stream, without a decoding signal from ALICE, BOB cannot extract these special events from the original two-photon situation. So says the mathematics. Once again clever Nature has prevented us from using Her marvelous quantum entanglement to send signals faster than light.

Goodbye to VLAD as an FTL signaling device. Farewell, VLAD. Da svedanya.

And the four Russians conclude their QVE paper thus: "We expect the quantum vampire effect to find applications in quantum information technology...The ability to "steal" a photon without casting a shadow may prove useful for eavesdropping in quantum key distributions as well as developing quantum cloaking devices. We also believe the effect to be of fundamental interest, as quantum action at a distance that is not associated with a local state collapse has not yet been studied."

I wish to thank Doctor Alex Lvovsky for patiently clarifying for me many subtle features of the Quantum Vampire Effect. Without his help this post would have been impossible.

Nick Herbert, the Lonely Ranger of Quantum Tantra

The Lonely Ranger of Quantum Tantra?

Nick Herbert, the Lonely Ranger 

of Quantum Tantra

Physicist Nick Herbert, venturing upon a brave path, has committed his life to re-enchanting the physics of a poetic and erotic dimension.

      
Nick Herbert was one of the most promising physicists in the world of quantum mechanics, with a PhD from Stanford University and a solid academic career. He developed new magnetic materials and optical devices; he pioneered in the development of ink-jet printers and contributed to the interpretation of John Bell's non-locality theorem. But, at some point during the second half of the 1960s, he decided to abandon academic research and pursue his own path.

His holistic vision of physics, where consciousness plays the leading role in nature's composition, has led him to mould an animistic universe, in which the mind permeates nature on all levels. This important notion, shared by some physicists like David Bohm and Wolfgang Pauli, erupts in Herbert, who developed a new poetics of physics in order to create an affinity between the universe and its evolution.

Far from science's mainstream constrictions, Herbert has diverged into a dimension where eroticism and poetry are fused with physics and arcane science. He calls this "quantum tantra", a ludic-cosmic vision of reality. This tantra happens in the most basic substrate and it appears in the most intimate union at the bottom of matter, in the quantum void where the energy that invigorates the cosmic machine bursts forth. Herbert announces in a playful and irrepressible vein "we want to have sex with atoms".

Perhaps what makes Herbert all the more interesting is the manner in which he sets a living example of Schlegel’s words: "if you wish to penetrate the secrets of physics, allow yourself to be initiate in the mysteries of poetry", which is the same as saying that in order to understand something it is necessary not only to observe it, but to be able to enter into it and possibly to create it.  A Romantic like Schlegel, Herbert makes a call to understand nature as seduction.

If science has been able to tame nature (perhaps too well), it is now time to learn how to seduce it, to see it not as a series of dead parts, but to approach it as if it was Our Loved One's body, and this not as metaphor or mysticism but something that extends into physics. Few conventional scientists will be interested in or have the ability to partake in this type of science. For this new type of work (and new play), quantum tantra will call forth a new type of genius, men and women, Scientists/Lovers of the Cosmos, brave athletes of heart and mind.

Unveiling a new type of physics in which nature is viewed as a living being (or a goddess) with whom one can have a thorough exchange, a much more significant relationship than mere observance, Nick Herbert has established himself as a person at the forefront of the transformation of science's dominant paradigm.

=====================================

Last night, recoiling from the tedious task of finishing some necessary paperwork, I decided to indulge instead in a bit of ego-surfing. Googling my own name and a few key words, I was surprised to run across the above analysis of my work on an art-dazzle site designed to publicize the luxury hotel complexes of Brazilian mega-developer Alan Faena in Miami Beach and Buenos Aries. I was initially flattered by this high-brow review but my next thought was that one of my old buddies (or girlfriends) from Stanford had landed a prestigious job at the top of the literary food chain and was using his or her position to play a prank on a former classmate. Nick Herbert and Karl Friedrich Schlegel joined together in the same sentence?--a fine joke indeed!

Sadly, the author of this charming little piece is not credited. Many thanks, anonymous angel! You did a first-rate job of characterizing Nick Herbert's difficult-to-describe quantum tantric quest.

Besides the quantum tantra review, the Faena site has published hundreds of fascinating little essays, including The Luminous Dance, a list of the world's best beaches for observing bioluminescence; Arthur Schoperhauer on The Art of Telling the Truth; WH Auden's Daydream University; Salvador Dali's illustrations of Alice in Wonderland ; the origin story of San Francisco's Church of St John Coltrane; Anais Nin on the mystery of ordinary life; and the poetry and prose of Marilyn Monroe. Alongside Malcolm X, the religious rebel, and Pancho Villa, the heroic bandit, Nick Herbert, the Lonely Ranger of quantum tantra, fits right in. You can access all these essays thru the Faena art archive but searching for and linking to a specific essay is difficult -- at least for me. The archive begins in May 2012 and the quantum-tantra review appeared in April 2013. Hey, Faena people, your scintillating archive is begging for a good indexing.

With or without a convenient search machine, the Faena archive is a dangerous time trap for Internet procrastinators -- offering up hundreds of greasy, salty bits of brainy snack food to tempt the curious mind. The more you eat the more you want. You have been warned.

Finally the Faenasphere's flattering review of my ludic-cosmic pretensions raises an important question: If Nick Herbert's the Lonely Ranger, then who is quantum tantra's Tonto?