The Reality Prize

Esalen Seminar on the Nature of Reality Poster

THE REALITY PRIZE

 In the late 1970s, Esalen Institute co-founder Michael Murphy decided to invite physicists down to Big Sur to see what might happen. One of Mike's speculations was that “Perhaps a new kind of inspired physicist, experienced in the yogic modes of perception, might emerge to comprehend the further reaches of matter, space and time.” So it happened that physicist Saul-Paul Sirag and myself found ourselves leading workshops on quantum mechanics for Esalen guests and holding yearly invitational conferences for selected scientists focused mainly on the theme of Irish physicist John Stewart Bell's non-locality theorem for quantum-entangled systems.

Quantum theory is one of our most successful mathematical tools for understanding the behavior of Nature at her most basic level. This theory has never made a wrong prediction and some of its results agree with experiment up to 13 decimal places. However its success is marred by what one might call The Reality Crisis. Though I have struggled with this theory for more than fifty years, I cannot tell my son Khola a simple story about how the world works on the quantum level. And neither can anyone else.

Quantum physicists represent the world in two ways depending on whether the world's being looked at or not. Waves of possibility when not looked at; And an actual particle when we look. Plus physicists don't really know what “looking” means — an embarrassing situation called “the measurement problem”. Wanna stump a physicist? Ask him (or her) what they think it takes to turn many shimmering quantum possibilities into one hard quantum fact.

Oddly enough, The Reality Crisis (physicist's inability to tell a good quantum story) does not hamper at all our ability to use this wonderful tool to make successful predictions. So, for the most part, practical physicists have consigned “thinking about reality” to the philosophers, to physicists who have already made their mark in the world and to amateurs (from the French word “to love”) who have no reputation to lose. “Do not keep saying to yourself if you can possibly avoid it,” warned physicist Richard Feynman, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will go 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”

To explain how one particle becomes actual is puzzling enough, but the stakes are raised once two particles are involved, especially if they happen to be created in a state of “quantum entanglement”. Then, when unlooked at at least, the two entities do not possess their own attributes. Only the union of the two is in a definite state of being, until a measurement is made. Erwin Schrōdinger was the first to point out the peculiar nature of entangled quantum systems and to comment that this strange mode of being was what most distinguished the quantum world from everyday stuff..

But in Schrōdinger's day, entangled quantum systems were hard to come by. So quantum entanglement, for the most part, remained a theoretical curiosity, if it was even mentioned at all.

That all changed in 1964, when a physicist named John Stewart Bell, whose hobby happened to be quantum reality, discovered, during a sabbatical leave from his day job at CERN accelerator, what is now know as “Bell's Theorem.”

The Bell Experiment

 

Imagine a source S of polarization-entangled photon pairs A and B. Photon A is sent to Alice and photon B to Bob who each have a device that measures photon polarization. One of the important features of a quantum measurement is that Alice cannot just ask “what properties does her A photon actually possess?” but must make a choice of what attribute to ask about and which attributes to leave unknown.

Quantum attributes come in complementary pairs (and often triplets). If you ask about position, you forego finding out about momentum, a discovery attributed to Heisenberg, known as “the uncertainty principle”. Photon polarization happens to be one of those quantum attributes that is triplely uncertain, so when Alice chooses to measure one photon polarization plane, she necessarily forfeits all knowledge of the other two polarization planes.

At both Alice and Bob's stations, imagine a clock face that represents the direction that the two experimenters choose to interrogate their photon's unknown polarization. If Alice chooses to ask at 12 o'clock, a PLUS in her detector means that her A photon polarization is Vertical (V); a MINUS means that its polarization is Horizontal (H).

Two features of this system are typical of an entangled state:. 1. No matter what their clock settings, each observer always gets a random sequence of PLUSs and MINUSs; 2. Whenever Alice's setting is the same as Bob's, if Alice gets a PLUS, Bob will always get a MINUS and vice versa. Their results are said to be 1. Perfectly random and 2. Perfectly anti-correlated.

Since polarization-entangled states were almost non-existent in 1964, nobody really knew if this would actually happen to Alice and Bob, but a simple quantum calculation gives the result quoted above.

Physicists “represent” an unobserved quantum system by a mathematical entity called a wavefunction. I carefully use the word “represent” rather than “describe” because we don't really know what the real relationship is between the wavefunction and the actual world, another embarrassing situation called “the interpretation problem”. Physicists know how to use the wavefunction to correctly calculate (the probability of) all experimental results but they don't really know what the wavefunction means.

So what more does this magnificently useful but utterly mysterious wavefunction say about the Alice and Bob experiment?

First: Quantum theory says that whatever happens is entirely independent of the distance between Alice and Bob. If they are in the same room, as in most practical physics experiments, the results will be exactly the same as if they were ten thousand light years apart, separated by vast interstellar distances.

Second: While unobserved, the wavefunction does not assign any polarization attribute to either Alice's or Bob's photon, but when Alice measures her photon, using a clock direction of her choice, her photon instantly acquires a definite value, AND SO DOES BOB'S PHOTON even though Alice and Bob might be separated by galactic distance. This instantaneous connection, if it is real and not just confined to the theory, violates all the norms of modern physics.

Alice's apparently instant action on Bob's photon has gotta be faster than light (goodbye Einstein) but that's only part of the trouble. This interaction, unlike any we are familiar with in physics, is not diminished by distance. Furthermore, this Alice-Bob intimacy is not transmitted by any field we know of-- it just happens. Alice's action on Bob's photon is, in brief, unmitigated, unmediated and immediate.

Physicists label such alleged behavior, as “non-local”, a tame word that conceals their deep intellectual loathing for an unholy abomination, for a deeply unnatural act. In the world of physics, a “non-local interaction¨, if such a thing ever occured, would be a mortal sin against the Holy Ghost. Non-local interactions are, in physicist's minds, comparable to believing in voodoo, which, come to think of it, is alleged by its practitioners to behave somewhat “non-locally” too.

Third: But what about Einstein? If Alice has access to a non-local interaction, can she and Bob exchange signals faster than light using entangled photons? Since quantum theory describes all experiments perfectly, it can easily answer this question. And the answer is NO. No superluminal signaling is possible using entangled photons. What forbids this is the randomness of each individual event which exactly smothers any alleged non-local Alice-Bob connection.

So what did Bell do with this strange situation? He went against Feynman’s warning about trying to tell a story about what's really going on. Bell's Theorem is not about quantum THEORY, not about quantum EXPERIMENTS, but about quantum REALITY.

Bell tried to imagine the most general model of reality that he could think of, using the term “hidden variables” to make his guesses amenable to mathematical calculation. He imagined all the influences that might go into forming Bob's polarization measurement and left out just one: Alice's choice of what to measure. If Alice's choice is allowed to influence Bob's result, that would imply the existence of a real (we're talking about reality here) non-local interaction in Nature.

Using this one assumption, Bell calculated a set of inequalities that the EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS of any local model of reality must satisfy.

Guess what? The results predicted by quantum mechanics do not obey the Bell Inequalities. Therefore REALITY MUST BE NON-LOCAL. Bring out your crosses and holy waters, folks. The witch doctors is loose!

The reception of Bell's remarkable proof, which was published in 1964, in an obscure and rather short-lived journal, was a resounding silence. John Clauser, then a graduate student at Columbia, discovered Bell's Theorem in 1969 and wrote him about the possibility of doing an actual experiment to check whether the quantum predictions were correct. Bell reported that this was the first comment on his paper he had yet received—more than four years after its publication.

You often hear it said that when Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity,  only six people understood it. In truth, there were probably lots more than six. But it is fair to say, that when John Bell published his now famous paper, ONLY SIX PEOPLE CARED. John Clauser was one of them.

For the next part of the story I quote David Kaiser's “How the Hippies Saved Physics” which discusses Clauser's accomplishments in great detail.

“Clauser, a budding experimentalist, realized that Bell's theorem could be amenable to real-world tests in a laboratory. Excited, he told his thesis advisor about his find, only to be rebuffed for wasting their time on such philosophical questions. Soon Clauser would be kicked out of some of the finest offices in physics, from Robert Serber's at Columbia to Richard Feynman's at Caltech. Bowing to these pressures, Clauser pursued a dissertation on a more acceptable topic—radio astronomy and astrophysics—but in the back of his mind he continued to puzzle through how Bell's inequality might be put to the test.”

John Clauser lecturing at Esalen

 I first met John Clauser in his lab at Berkeley in the early 70s where he had cobbled together an ingenious device to test the Bell Inequalities using the few entangled photons that a mercury-vapor lamp produces. He hoped he would gain fame by showing that, for this particular system, quantum theory was wrong, and Reality was Local, as Einstein would have guessed. He succeeded however in finding that quantum theory was right, which means, according to Bell's Proof, that Reality must be non-local! This world, all that we can see around us, remains stubbornly local, but is undergirded, at least in the case of entangled photons, by a network of instant invisible voodoo-like connections.

I was introduced to Clauser as a member of Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissman's Fundamental Fysiks Group and marveled at his Rube Goldberg setup for measuring polarized-photon coincidences. (He was using pile-of-plates polarizers, for Gods sake!) In addition to recruiting experimentalist John Clauser, FFG also attracted Henry Pierce Stapp, a Berkeley theorist interested in fundamental questions. All of our later ESNR meetings included Clauser and Stapp as core personnel.

Henry Stapp pushed us to closely examine every assumption that goes into Bell's proof, especially those that seem most self-evident, and Clauser kept us posted on other Bell Inequality tests besides his own that were being planned and carried out around the world.

The title of our Esalen Conference: Esalen Seminars on the Nature of Reality, was neither silly nor pretentious. We really were studying “reality” as physicists might view it, as an attempt to tell a story about what's actually going on behind the wavefunction mystery and the measurement mystery. For our ESNR motto we chose a quote from Goethe's Faust, who was also a passionate seeker of Reality. Attesting to the real strangeness of our quest, Clauser's colleague Abner Shimony dubbed these Bell tests "experimental metaphysics."

Our third Esalen meeting (ESNR #3) in 1982 featured a ceremony sponsored by Charles Brandon, one of the founders of Federal Express, to award both John Bell and John Clauser “The Reality Prize” of $3000 each for their firm establishment through theory and experiment of non-locality as a general feature of the world. Bell's Reality Prize was accepted by French physicist Bernard d'Espagnat since Bell could not be there in person. We assured the participants that this prize was merely the first of many that would be bestowed upon the two of them.

Reality Prize Announcement: Esalen Catalog

 

Unfortunately, John Stewart Bell died in 1990, at the age of 62 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

In 2010, John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger were awarded the prestigious (Ricardo) Wolf Prize.

And just last week, the same three men were honored with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hearty congratulations to all three of you, O bold and noble champions of quantum reality!

Clauser, Zeilinger, Aspect: Physics Nobel Prize 2022: Quanta Magazine

First Physics-based Restriction on Local Psychic Powers

Nick Herbert devises an important new restriction on local psychic powers.

FIRST PHYSICS-BASED RESTRICTION ON LOCAL PSYCHIC POWERS

Personal experience, scientific research and the occasional spectacular phenomenon (a flying monk from Cupertino, for instance) seem to demonstrate the real existence of psychic powers, but our theoretical understanding and extension of such powers seems not to have advanced at all. Most limiting is the fact that we possess no confident scientific understanding of ordinary consciousness let alone its paranormal extensions. Much to be desired would be the application of the methods of our dazzlingly successful physical sciences to some of the problems of mind. That is what I have done, in a small way, in an article soon to appear in the journal Activitas Nervosa Superior (online version here) as part of a Festschrift in honor of Berkeley physicist Henry Pierce Stapp.

On the other hand, the moderators of the Cornell University Physics arXiv, which I scan daily, looking for innovations in quantum physics, have declined to list this article on the grounds that "your submission is not of plausible interest for arXiv." My guess is that the mere mention of "psychic powers" in a physics paper caused some old fuddy duddy at arXiv to lose his lunch.

From the great variety of possible psychic powers I chose extrasensory perception, the alleged ability of a psychically gifted human being to correctly guess, with odds better than chance, the outcome of a sequence of symbols generated by a random process. To simplify the discussion, I limit the choice of target symbols to two, which could be zero/one, black/red, heads/tails or even/odd. And the random process is designed to make each of these two symbols appear with 50/50 probability. The "power" of a psychic faced with such a task is defined by the percentage of correct guesses that consistently exceed 50%. On this scale a perfect score would be "50".

Once we find a high-scoring psychic let's now confront him or her with two different kinds of tasks which I will describe as classical ignorance and quantum ignorance.

Classical ignorance; result exists before guess and is governed by classical randomness

 In the case of classical ignorance, the target symbol exists before the psychic makes his guess. As in the turning over of a top card -- the card was definitely"black" or "red" but its value was hidden from ordinary perception.

Quantum ignorance: result does not exist before guess and is governed by quantum randomness

 In the case of quantum ignorance, the target symbol is produced only after the guess and is governed by quantum randomness -- the basic uncertainty that governs every quantum transition in the Universe. In the example above, the blue cylinder shoots a single photon at a half-silvered mirror. Whether the mirror deflects the photon forward into red photon detector #1 or sideways into red photon detector #2 is determined by an uncertainty so fundamental that some physicists have joked that not even God can say which path that single photon will take.

Now the question I ask about psychic powers is this: Which kind of ignorance does the psychic find easier for his extrasensory powers to overcome -- classical or quantum uncertainty?

Since we know absolutely nothing about how psychic powers operate, we are free to let our imaginations run wild. Perhaps, for instance, quantum uncertainty is somehow "softer" and more "mindlike" than classical uncertainty so the psychic will score higher on the quantum task. On the other hand, if it is true that not even God can predict the outcome of a quantum-random event, then the psychic must necessarily score higher on the classical task.

Via a digression into the topic of faster-than-light (FTL) signaling schemes, I answer the question of whether a psychic can score better against classical or against quantum ignorance.

For longer than I can remember, I have been curious about superluminal signaling schemes and have invented several devices tagged with unusual acronyms: QUIK, FLASH, ETCALLHOME and many others, and I was much involved in the refutation of Demetrios Kalamidas's ingenious KISS scheme. The detailed refutation of each of these proposals led to a slightly deeper understanding of the foundations of quantum theory. And in the case of the refutation of FLASH, resulted in the discovery of the quantum no-cloning rule. 

Each of these proposed FTL signaling devices invokes the strange situation of quantum entanglement in which two photons A and B, separated by a great distance, nonetheless appear to act as though they were a single entity. In the usual setup, photon A is sent to Alice and photon B is sent to Bob. In the math it looks as though what Alice chooses to measure on her photon A seems to instantly affect what Bob will measure on his photon B. Irish physicist John Bell proved in 1964 that any model of reality that correctly describes quantum entanglement must necessarily be non-local, that is, something must be going on that is faster than light. Bell's theorem proves that deep reality must be faster than light. But we humans cannot observe deep reality, only its surface consequences; and these surface consequences always appear to obey the Einstein speed limit.

Indeed, a result proved by Philippe Eberhard, a colleague of Henry Stapp's at Berkeley, shows that any ordinary measurements performed by Alice will have no measurable effect at Bob's receiving site. Eberhard's Proof demonstrates that superluminal signaling using Alice/Bob quantum entanglement is impossible.

Alice and Bob each receive one member of a pair of entangled photons. Is there anything they can do that would allow Alice to send an FTL message that Bob could decode?

To get around the roadblock of Eberhard's Proof, one might consider using a clever and subtle measurement process that evades the proof's assumptions. The hope of devising some unconventional measurement scheme lies behind the KISS, FLASH, QUIK, etc. schemes mentioned above. None of these measurement schemes, however, is bizarre enough to evade Eberhard's sturdy proof of the impossibility of using quantum entanglement for superluminal signaling.

But what about going beyond physics into the realm of psychic powers?

That's what I have done in my recent paper. In my setup, Alice sends Bob a Morse Code signal which he receives as two kinds of ignorance. a dot is encoded as a situation of classical ignorance. And a dash is encoded as a situation of quantum ignorance. Alice sends each symbol as a bunch of N photons that appear at Bob's site to possess the same kind of ignorance, that is, all N photons in a bunch are either all classically or all quantum uncertain.

Upon receiving Alice's message, Bob applies his psychic powers to try to guess the outcome of his measuring a particular bunch of N photons. If Bob's psychic power works better for one kind of ignorance rather than another, then Bob can successfully decode Alice's message as a series of dots and dashes.

This method of signaling faster than light evades Eberhard's Proof because it does not use conventional physical measurements, but measurements of an entirely non-physical kind.

The acronym for my scheme, by the way, is GUESS = Going Unphysical Enables Superluminal Signaling.

However, an easy way to outlaw superluminal signaling of the GUESS kind is to demand that a psychic's ability to guess a quantum random sequence must be exactly equal to his ability to guess a classical random sequence.

This result I call "Nick's restriction". The journal referees made me call it something else but in my blog I can call it anything I want. And so can you.

One beauty of Nick's restriction is that it can be experimentally tested. All one needs to do is find a reliable psychic and to devise a robust on-demand source of quantum randomness.

A further beauty of Nick's restriction is that it cannot fail. If measurement does show the expected result: that a psychic possesses identical powers of guessing quantum or classical random sequences, then Nick's restriction will take its rightful place as one of the solid cornerstone truths of a modern psychic science.

But what if Nick's restriction is false? What if psychic researchers measure a consistent difference between a psychic's ability to fathom one kind of ignorance rather than another?

Why that's even better. For then we will be able to use quantum entanglement to send signals faster than light.

A basic new law of psychic phenomena? Or an easy FTL communication scheme?

On the question of the practical usefulness of Nick's restriction, we simply can't lose.

Does Doc Brown's psychic power amplifier obey Nick's restriction or not?

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire

Nick meets a Luck Wave (design by August O'Connor)

THAT NATURE IS A HERACLITEAN FIRE

I have spent more than a third of my life speculating (with congenial physicist friends) about what quantum mechanics might actually mean -- and have even written a book about it. The gist of the quantum dilemma is that we have a Quantum Theory that successfully predicts the results of every physical measurement. But with this theory comes an utter inability to tell a plausible story about what's really going on in the world -- both before, during and after a measurement. Physicists today possess an essentially perfect Quantum Theory, know how to experimentally produce subtle and delicate Quantum Facts, but cannot convincingly tell their kids a Quantum Reality story that adequately explains both Quantum Theory and Quantum Facts.

Many words concerning quantum reality were exchanged by quantum theory's founders -- especially Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr -- but not much progress was made until the remarkable discovery of Irish physicist John Stewart Bell who formulated an experimental test that could confidently eliminate an entire class of quantum reality models. Not only is it rare for physicists (or anybody else) to TALK ABOUT REALITY, it is even rarer (such was the importance of Bell's discovery) to come up with EXPERIMENTS ON REALITY. Consequently, Bell's original 1964 paper has become one of the most-cited publications in physics.

Bell's original experiment involved TWO ENTANGLED PHOTONS -- one sent to Alice and one to Bob. About this setup, quantum theory says two seemingly contradictory things: 1. that the quantum state of Bob's photon depends instantly (faster-than-light) on Alice's choice of what to measure; 2. that this apparent instantaneous action can never be used for signaling.

The physics jargon for instantaneous voodoo-like connections is the word "non-local". Non-local effects (either in theory or in practice) are as welcome in physics as a corpse at a wedding feast.

So before Bell came along, the theory of entangled systems was manifestly non-local (BAD!), but the same theory also assured that no experiment would ever be able to directly reveal this non-locality (GOOD!).

So quantum theory of entangled systems is NON-LOCAL: But all quantum facts are LOCAL.

What about quantum reality -- the underlying causal dynamics behind both theory and fact? Do we live in a world that's deep-down linked by abominable (to the physicist) non-local connections? Or is quantum reality nicely local, just like the quantum facts?

Bell's surprising conclusion (a powerful mathematical proof, not a mere conjecture) is that no local reality can underlie this everywhere local world.

Quantum reality must be non-local, according to Bell's proof.

To a physicist, Bell's conclusion is preposterous and must certainly be wrong. My first entry into the Bell's Theorem game was an attempt to disprove John Bell. Which ended in my formulating the world's shortest proof for the non-local nature of quantum reality.

Bell's Theorem is so simple that it is difficult to find a flaw. But Bell's greatest weakness can be summed up in the dichotomy: if reality exists, then it must be non-local; but if you DENY REALITY, then you are let off the hook.

But what could "denying reality" possibly mean?

One innocent (but crucial) assumption in Bell's proof is called "contrafactual definiteness" (or CFD, for short).

When you do the Bell experiment on a single pair of entangled photons, both Alice and Bob can set their detectors at only ONE SETTING. But to prove BT, you need to consider the possible results of FOUR SETTINGS. Four settings for the same two-photon event.

CFD assumes that: if we had performed three other measurements -- other than the actual one -- we would have gotten three definite (but unknown) results.

But if the nature of the quantum world is such that CFD is not valid, then you can't prove Bell's theorem. In fact, in a non-CFD world, you cannot even formulate Bell's theorem.

A recent paper by Gerold Gründler from Nürnberg, Germany, (What Does Bell's Inequality Actually Prove?) analyzes a few ways of "denying reality" by postulating (and perhaps even proving -- I am not sure) that we live in a world which does not support CFD. Gründler revisits and revises an earlier work by Israeli physicist, the late Asher Peres, entitled Unperformed Experiments Have No Results (3 page pdf).

Peres's paper suggests that we might live in a world where Unperformed Experiments Have No Results. But what are the details of such a world? How does it actually work?

What would it be like to live in a world where CFD is inconceivable?

Here's one attempt to visualize such a world.

Our thinking about the classical world is dominated by movies. It is easy to imagine rewinding the film, changing only one thing, then doing an (imaginary) retake. Certainly this cinematic model of reality allows us to at least imagine what the results of Unperformed Experiments might look like.

We can even add quantum randomness to the picture by allowing some features of the scene to depend on pure chance. Imagine filming a gambling table -- each reshoot, even of the same game, will give definite but different outcomes -- outcomes that are governed by statistical laws -- analogous to the probabilistic outcomes predicted by quantum mechanics. Bell's Theorem can be proved in a world like this -- a world of definite but statistically determined results.

To move into a non-CFD world, consider the case of a single Uranium atom. Physics considers all Uranium atoms to be EXACTLY THE SAME. Yet this one decayed in one second, while its identical sister is still alive after a million years. The first atom's short life is not due to some defect in its constitution. That's just the way the quantum world works -- identical quantum objects behave differently -- FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

Now consider how the movie analogy might work in a fully quantum world. We rewind the film, KEEP EVERYTHING THE SAME. Then change just one setting and reshoot the experiment.

Keeping everything the same is easy in a quantum world: every photon, electron, quark has always been just the same as every other. But the big problem is that each particle in the universe now behaves differently than in the first take -- giving rise to an entirely different universe -- a universe in which not only does the camera not exist, but the cameraman, the human species, and all life on Earth have vanished. In this second take on our present quantum reality the familiar Earth has no doubt disappeared as well.

As Heraclitus warned, you cannot step twice into the same river, because the river is never the same.

Might an Asher-Peres world in which Unperformed Experiments Have No Results be "hyper-Heraclitean" in the sense that in this kind of quantum reality even the same river is not the same river? In fact this river revisited second time round might not even be a river at all but the insides of a black hole.

Trying to visualize quantum worlds in which CFD is inconceivable might push us to think more deeply not only about fully quantum concepts such as "superposition", "entanglement" and "wave/particle duality" but also to revise our old-fashioned assumptions about everyday classical concepts such as "same", "different", "spontaneity" and even how to correctly use the word "again" when it comes to properly refilming in our imagination the very same event that has already happened once.

JUJITSU UNIVERSE

We house-broke quantum reality

Trained Schrödinger's Cat to purr

Now daily life's more uncanny

Than atoms ever were.

Asher Peres, who titled his bio "The cat who walks by himself", played a vital part in publicizing the role both he and myself played in the discovery of the quantum "no cloning rule". (How the no-cloning theorem got its name.) which eventually inspired MIT professor David Kaiser to write his popular science history book: How the Hippies Saved Physics. In addition to his pioneering work in quantum information theory, Asher Peres will probably be remembered most as a member of the team of six people who devised the remarkably clever Quantum Teleportation process.

The title of this post was taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins's splendid poem: That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.

Asher Peres (bottom right) and his five buddies who invented Quantum Teleportation

Saul-Paul Sirag's New Math Book

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

SAUL-PAUL SIRAG'S NEW MATH BOOK

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

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

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

Saul-Paul Sirag plus a Hair poster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saul-Paul Sirag's New Math Book

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

Saul-Paul Sirag and the five Coxeter graphs

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Coxeter reflection groups, or Weyl groups

(the objects these diagrams were originally designed to represent)

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

(the "butterfly catastrophe" lives in phylum A5)

3. Digital error-correcting codes

(Hamming-8 code lives in phylum E8)

4. Knot and Braid theory

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

5. Maximal quantum entanglement of 3 qubits

(related to the E7 phylum)

6. Roger Penrose's "twistor theory"

(twistors live in every ADE phylum)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bell's Theorem on xkcd

Bell's Theorem (Randall Munroe at xkcd)

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.

My Dinner with John and Mary Bell

Dinner Party chez Pierre and Mary Noyes: March 1988

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter to St. Charles

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

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

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


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

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

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

Nick Herbert, St Charles Borromeo, Class of 1954

Bell's Theorem

Outside of my best-selling physics book Quantum Reality, my main contribution to the advancement of human knowledge seems to be to invent things that are wrong. But wrong in ways that lead to important new discoveries.

For instance in 1982, I proposed a new laser-based faster-than-light (FTL) signaling scheme which I called FLASH (First Laser-Amplified Superluminal Hookup) whose refutation by Wooters and Zurek, led directly to the discovery of the quantum no-cloning rule which now plays an important role in the brand-new field of quantum computing.

In 2008, I proposed another FTL signaling scheme called ETCALLHOME (Entanglement Telegraphed Communication Avoiding Light-speed Limitations using Hong-Ou-Mandel Effect) which was refuted before it was published by Lev Vaidman at Tel Aviv University and led directly to my discovery of the quantum no-wedding rule which has yet to find a good technological application.

In 2009, I proved "Nick's Theorem" which places quantitative bounds on psychic powers using arguments drawn entirely from physics--the first result of its kind to use purely materialist arguments to set definite limits to immaterial abilities. Judging from my track record, it will only be a matter of time before some enterprising young psychic researcher definitively refutes Nick's Theorem and in the process makes an important new breakthrough into the deep structure of the mental universe.

But of all these "creative failures" none matches in excitement my unsuccessful attempt to refute Bell's Theorem. My first contact with Bell's Theorem (which John Stewart Bell proved in 1964) was in 1970 when my friend Heinz Pagels discovered it in some obscure physics journal and brought a copy to my home in the woods of Boulder Creek. I immediately felt that Bell had to be wrong--what he was proposing was patently absurd. And Nick Herbert would win fame by proving John Bell wrong.

But first I had to simplify his proof so that it was easy to understand--and hence easy to refute. Imagine my surprise when I discovered not a refutation of Bell's Theorem, but the world's simplest proof--only four lines! This short proof now appears in many textbooks; my latest version is published here.

What is Bell's Theorem and why is it so important?

The most astonishing feature of Bell's Theorem is that it is not a statement about theory nor a statement about experiment but a statement about REALITY ITSELF.

How can puny humans presume to talk sensibly about REALITY ITSELF? On what grounds could we ever hope to even begin such a discussion. Yet John Stewart Bell, a witty Irishman from Belfast, not only presumed to talk about REALITY ITSELF. He did more than talk. This audacious red-bearded Irishman announced in 1964 that he could prove mathematically that REALITY MUST POSSESS CERTAIN PROPERTIES.

What were these properties that Bell claimed that reality must possess?

It has to do with how the physical world is connected together. Is the world "local" or is it "non-local"?

A "local connection" is physics jargon for a distant influence that is mediated at all stages in the transmission. No jumps allowed. A telephone link, for instance, no matter how far the talkers are separated, is an example of a "local" connection. My voice excites the air, which is transformed into electricity in wires in my phone, which goes up to a satellite, down again into wires in your phone, into the air, then into your ear. At each stage of the process, this phone connection is subject to the famous Einstein speed limit: nothing can travel faster than light.

All physics theories and all physics experiments confirm the Einstein limit: no physical object, no wave, no energy, no information has even been observed to travel faster-than-light.

Local connections are mediated and light-speed-limited. A "non-local connection", on the other hand, would be unmediated and instantaneous. Such a connection, if it existed, would directly jump from one location to another without passing in between, and would take no time to do so. An example of a non-local connection might be my sticking a pin in a voodoo doll and you instantly getting a headache. Einstein called such non-local connections, "spooky action-at-a-distance"and like every other sensible physicist firmly believed that such connections existed nowhere in Nature.

Non-local connections are forbidden by current theories of physics. All physics experiments give strictly local results. Given that the world on the surface seems entirely local one would imagine that to explain this entirely local world, a local reality would suffice.

Contrary to this commonsense expectation, Bell proved that NO LOCAL REALITY CAN EXPLAIN OUR LOCAL WORLD.

Bell proved that reality is non-local. How did he do that? Read my proof.

Bell's audacious proof has been dismissed by some as "mere philosophy" (since reality by its very nature is unobservable) and praised by others as "the most profound discovery in science". But one thing is certain, Bell's theorem has inspired physicists to examine anew the peculiar phenomenon of quantum entanglement and has spawned the development of new quantum technologies such as quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum money.

Bell's theorem proves indirectly that reality is non-local. One way to directly show off the world's deep non-locality would be to find a way to use reality to send faster-than-light signals. Quantum teleportation, a recent discovery by six researchers at IBM, comes very close to directly demonstrating instant, unmediated transmission across a large distance.

Alice at location A wants to transmit an definite but unknown quantum state X to Bob at distant location B. She performs a clever quantum measurement on X which does three things: 1) destroys all trace of state X at location A; 2) instantly teleports state X to Bob at location B and 3) gives Alice one of four results 0, 1, 2, 3).

Bob at location B, instantly receives state X. Non-locality is real--this experiment proves it.

But what about the Einstein limit? The catch is this. Along with the correct state X, Alice sends three decoy states which Bob cannot distinguish from state X. The correct state is sent when Alice detects a "0" in her counter which happens randomly one time out of four. The only way for Bob to distinguish the correct teleported state from the decoys, is to receive from Alice the information that she got a "0" as a result. But Alice can only send this information via ordinary light-speed-limited channels. Conclusion: quantum information can be teleported faster-than-light. But it needs to be decoded by signals which obey the Einstein speed limit.

John Stewart Bell proved that an invisible instantly connected voodoo reality must underlie our ordinary light-speed mediated world. Quantum teleportation is one practical application of non-local reality. Certainly many more discoveries await us as we explore more deeply the consequences of Bell's astonishing discovery which might be envisioned as the first page of a brand-new chapter in How The Irish Saved Civilization.