Experiencing Quantum Reality

EXPERIENCING QUANTUM REALITY

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

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

What is Reality?

Nick consults his Quantum Reality bible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year 2013

Nick face-to-face with the Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turfing

Singularity by Gwyllm Llwydd

To celebrate Winter Solstice 2012, nothing could be finer than a visit to Turfing, one of my favorite websites. Turfing is a consistently strange and beautiful collection of text, image and videos curated by Gwyllm Llwydd, an artist, editor and poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. Gwyllm also publishes a website called Earthrites consisting primarily of images.

In Gwyllm's Singularity post, one finds, consistent with the current End of the World theme, a poster announcing a Conference of Disembodied Masters plus The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, by Jack Kerouac, who gently reminds us that the world will never end because it never began in the first place. Ah, those crazy beatniks! The same post also includes more quotes by and about beatniks as well as two music videos featuring John Coltrane playing Lush Life and Autumn Leaves.

In a second post, called Horizon, Gwyllm presents a few poems by Robinson Jeffers, one of Nick's favorite bards, plus a remarkable article that appeared in the March 15. 1895 issue of the New York Herald--Orgies of the Hemp Eaters: Hashish Dreamers' Festival in Northwestern Syria at the Time of the Full Moon. Perhaps anticipating gonzo-style journalism made famous by Hunter Thompson a century later, the Herald's intrepid reporter partakes of the same intoxicants as his hosts. And witnesses "a Sacred Dance that surpasses the wildest ecstasy of any opium dream." Ah, those crazy Syrians!

The Almeh by Eugene Alexis Girardet

Happy YIDD

Nick Herbert wishes you Happy YIDD

HAPPY YIDD

The Mayans were right
to predict a dark night
that obliterates all you hold dear.
The prophecies say
It could happen today
And I believe what I hear.

This much is certain:
We can't halt that last curtain:
The end of phenomena, Nature undid.
But while we still here
Let's raise a loud cheer
For Ukrainian feast day of YIDD.

The Soviets slaughtered my people
They famined Twelve Million--they did.
But the rest of us here
Can still lift up a beer
For Ukrainian feast day of YIDD.

My folks worked the mines of Ohio
Black Diamond killed grandpa--it did
But we're out of the covers
And kissing our lovers
On Ukrainian feast day of YIDD.

The flag of Ukraine--gold and blue
She represents the wheat and sky.
Life is fleeting, this is true
But YIDD is here, so lift a brew.
What do we celebrate and why?
Yesterday I Didn't Die.

Courtesan and Crone

This October, Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA celebrated its Fiftieth Birthday with a number of special events among which was a short dance piece by legendary West Coast innovative dancer Anna Halprin who presented The Courtesan and the Crone. In the 60s I met my wife Betsy at Anna Halprin's studio in San Francisco where she studied, taught and performed at Halprin's Dancer's Workshop on Divisidero Street just a few blocks from Haight-Ashbury. How good to see Anna on stage again. Happy Birthday, dear Esalen. And "Bravo!", Anna Halprin. Your spirit continues to shine and inspire.

Nick's Dixon

Nick playing his new Tony Dixon whistle

About ten years ago I met an enormously talented woman who was, among her other talents, a cook, an artist and Irish musician, part of the duo/trio known as Dobhran ("Otter" in Gaelic) which played at Celtic festivals, weddings and wineries, and had produced three CDs of their tunes. In order to get closer to this marvelous creature and to move more easier in her circles I decided to learn to play some Irish instrument. Since I have almost no native musical ability, the fiddle was out, and likewise any rhythm instrument. so I settled on either concertina or penny whistle. For economic reasons the whistle won out and I have been trying to master this deceptively simple six-hole Irish noise-maker ever since.

Learning an instrument is like learning a language--it's a consciousness altering act. First of all you have to "court the instrument", caress it, coax it, discover what it (and you) can and cannot do together. Then, as you start memorizing pieces, a part of your unconscious emerges that can play the instrument without any conscious effort on your part. Then your performance becomes a peculiar dialog between the new being inside you that can play the whistle "by heart" and the conscious mind that wants to direct the sound into new paths. Playing music "by heart" is a fascinating conversation between conscious and subconscious entities resembling Buddhist meditations involving breathing which is another physiological function where the border between unconscious and conscious operations can be shifted at will.

The penny whistle (known also as tin whistle or Irish whistle) probably never ever cost as little as a penny. (The name may have arisen from small boys playing it in London streets "for pennies") but they are remarkable inexpensive--usually at prices less than $10.00 US. For that reason we whistle players are prone to WAS (whistle acquisition syndrome) in which new whistles are acquired at the drop of a hat. Sometimes friends unwittingly feed this addiction--three of my fondest whistles are gifts--1. a classic tin Clarke from my next-door neighbor; 2. a Guinness-branded aluminum pipe bought at Blarney Castle by a fellow whistle player and 3. a brass Walton purchased in Dublin by Bruce Damer after receiving his PhD from Trinity College. Wherever I am, I look about for new whistles, hoping to find that unattainable grail--that magic instrument that exactly fits my nature, the perfect whistle that is all "sweet spot"--no sour or squeaky notes--that delirious whistle that plays itself, that effortlessly pours forth seductive melodies that charm the savage beast, court the ladies or stir the tribe into battle.

After playing for years in sessions around Santa Cruz and in a few paid gigs, I decided that I was ready to appreciate a more expensive instrument (good hand-crafted whistles sell for as much as $300) and after shopping around on the web decided to buy a tunable polymer whistle from Tony Dixon who works in Devon, England. The whistle arrived (about $50 from Lark in the Morning in Mendocino) and I have since been coaxing, caressing and discovering both its virtues and its flaws--many of which are located, of course, on my side of the fipple (mouthpiece).

I have been fortunate to find a few good whistle tutors, both live and on the web. Foremost web tutor being the musical priest himself Ryan Duns, SJ. Best source for whistle lore = Chiff and Fipple. And for traditional Irish tunes and commentary see thesessions.org One of our local Celtic music luminaries, Mike Long has put together a collection of more than a 1000 Irish tunes ("more tunes than are good for you") which he privately circulated and has now made available on the web. And for tuning your instrument, calibrating your tuner, or just playing around with sounds, there's the Online Tuning Fork.

One of the most instructive comments on my budding career as a whistle player came a few years back from an experienced fiddle player in one of our sessions: "You're really sounding good, Nick," he said, "For a long time you've been really terrible." To an insecure musician like myself that kind of honest feedback was truly encouraging.

This Land is Mine

THIS LAND IS MINE by Nina Paley

Nina Paley is a remarkably productive artist who resided for a time in Santa Cruz, CA where she published a comic strip in a local print weekly and created the Cruzio Cat logo for cruzio.com, the local ISP that happens to host my email. Her best-known work is a full-length animated version of the Indian classic Ramayama tale entitled Sita Sings the Blues.

Paley is currently working on an animated version of the Exodus story--working title Sader-Masochism--of which one part is fully animated and viewable on Vimeo. This Land is Mine is Nina's capsule history of the Middle-East territory known as Canaan, the Levant, and Palestine/Israel--a delightful account, entertaining, I imagine, even to passionate Israel-firster Alan Dershowitz. View it here. For more information about Nina and the numerous actors in her territorial cartoon see her blog.

Nina has also produced a short ecology video entitled Stork which without a single word surpasses anything that the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood has ever come up with.

Quantum Tantra hats off to Nina Paley--an artistic genius!

Nina Paley--animator extraordinaire!

Amber Waves of Grain

Veterans Day 2012

O beautiful for spacious skies

For amber waves of grain.

         --America the Beautiful (Kathanne Lee Bates)

I have never been in the military but my younger brother, Duke, served as a Marine, and we two Ohio boys were raised to believe in the importance of patriotism and the essential role our soldiers play in defending our country. On Veteran's Day 2012 we rightly honor those soldiers who served our country not merely by paying taxes but by risking their physical bodies for the sake of America and its values.

Most American soldiers believe they are serving their country by fighting its wars but some soldiers have a different opinion, for instance, my friend Reno DeCaro, a veteran of the US Marine's elite Force Recon Division, who writes:

Reno: The sad news is that there is not a veteran alive who has served this country, regardless if this was his intention—look up patriot Pat Tillman---or if he was aware of it or not. What our guys in the military have served, and are still serving, is special interest groups and their bought representatives, i.e., elected officials. The agenda of those elected leaders only serves the welfare of the American people if, by chance, America's welfare happens to overlap with the welfare of some special interest group that brought our leaders into power.

Yes, I’m a veteran, a veteran of close to five years of service with the US Marine Corps and have five more years working for the US Army in a civilian capacity. I feel I have more right to speak about veterans than the draft dodgers and others who never dreamed of joining the military, but call themselves “commander in chief” or "advisers" to the commander in chief.

In addition to courage and love of country, I was given a brain and life experience to see through the “racket” that is sold to the American people in the form of patriotism. Major General Smedley Butler, one of the Marine Corps great war heroes, wrote a book called War is a Racket after more than 30 years of service with the Marines. 

General Butler: “War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. “

Reno: This country has been involved in more wars all over the world--some euphemistically called "military actions"--than any other country during the last hundred years. Every four years we elect someone who is willing to continue the racket of his predecessor. Sometimes he even receives a Nobel Peace Prize while waging war, approving institutionalized torture of people 10,000 miles away who are no threat to us, while limiting the personal freedom of Americans.

Unless you believe third-world cavemen with AK 47’s, RPG’s and IED’s are a threat to America, there is no reason for us to fight in Afghanistan killing tens of thousands of innocents while ruining the lives of tens of thousands of the best of our own people. The war in Iraq was something we were lied into, killed hundreds of thousands of people and did not benefit a single American not heavily invested in defense corporations.

Bringing our troops home to protect our borders from criminals crossing illegally en masse from a country with the highest crime rate in the world, while millions of illegals immigrating are putting stress on our social-service network is what would be in the interest of the American people. Which candidate capable of getting elected or which mass media outlet even raised that issue during any elections? None!

Every election is about “Hope and Change”. Nothing that is hoped for ever happens and the change is always for the worse as it affects the majority of Americans. This is not about Republicans or Democrats but about America's massively corrupt system of governance.

Nick: While I do not possess ex-Marine DeCaro's experience in the military, I do share his belief that patriotism--love of country and the willingness to fight to defend that country--is a most admirable human virtue. So how should we judge those who would exploit this most noble of virtues for ignoble ends?

Are not those men, hiding safely behind their desks while talking of "defending our freedoms" by putting American soldiers in harm's way for the sake of doubling some executive's million-dollar bonuses, the very opposite of patriots? Aren't they, rather, abusers of true patriotism for ends which only benefit a few and do not benefit our country as a whole?

This exploitation of a noble virtue for ignoble ends is a foul crime and deserves a new name, for which I suggest, in analogy to a similarly vile violation of human innocence, the term "patriot molestation".

When the next "military action" is proposed, or for that matter many of our present conflicts, every thoughtful American should ask (especially those who actually have to risk their lives): "Is this action truly in the service of my country, or is this just another case of patriot molestation?"

Reno: Don’t buy into the same lies we were told during Vietnam. “If we don’t fight them there we will have to fight them here.” Once we left the Vietnamese alone and went home they had no interest, nor the ability to fight us. The hundreds of billions a year of our tax dollars wasted to bomb people living in caves back to the Stone Age, and to bribe their leaders to pretend to like what we are doing there, could certainly be spent more wisely by funding jobs to rebuild America.

The same applies to the Iraqi wars and every conflict we have been involved in. The Kaiser posed no threat to the US in WW1, Hitler did not have the means to invade England, never mind America during WW2---Japan was economically and politically forced into a first strike that was known to Roosevelt days in advance. There was no domino effect of communism after we withdrew from Vietnam; Cuba has not harmed us after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the list goes on.  All lies to motivate the good people of the country to risk their lives to enrich a few.

After two Iraqi wars and an eleven-year war against Afghanistan, America the beautiful is nearly bankrupt but the number of its billionaires has doubled.

Who could argue against those historical facts without lying? And if these facts are correct, why should any patriot--someone who has the true interest of the American people at heart--allow his noble feeling of wanting to protect his country to be abused? Abused by those who profit without fighting. Abused by some patriot molester sitting safely behind a desk.

No one has better expressed the evil of exploiting the noble virtue of patriotism for ignoble ends than Rudyard Kipling who wrote, concerning the real motives behind World War 1, these famous lines:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Big Swirl

Superposition of +10 OAM plus -10 OAM

Quantum mechanics is usually perceived as the (somewhat bizarre) physics of the very small, while large objects obey the logic of common sense. One of the most exciting trends in modern physics is the attempt to create larger and larger objects that obey quantum rules and hence to quietly smuggle the weirdness of quantum reality into the realm of everyday life.

Recently Robert Fickler and his colleagues at the University Of Vienna have devised a clever experiment that expands the realm of quantum entanglement into the region of high quantum numbers by devising a scheme that entangles two photons with arbitrarily high values of "orbital angular momentum (OAM)"-- a quantity I will call "swirl".

Every photon has an intrinsic spin equal to one Planck unit. Most experiments in quantum entanglement operate by using special non-linear crystals to produce a pair of photons in which this spin degree of freedom is divided between the two photons in such a way that each photon is in an uncertain spin state but the spin of the larger two-photon state is quantum-determined. This leads to the unusual situation (characteristic of quantum entanglement) that no matter how distant the two photons are separated, they in some sense still form a single entity so that an action on one photon seems to instantly influence the properties of the other. One might imagine that this instant influence could be used to send faster-than-light signals and hence break the well-known Einstein speed limit but quantum theory possesses a subtle structure that allows Nature access to this superluminal channel while denying it to human beings.

Fickler and his friends start with the usual pair of photons entangled in spin-one space and by clever use of a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) -- a liquid-crystal device not too different from the gadget that is producing this image on your flat screen -- they can add to each photon a lot of "swirl" beginning with 10 spin units (shown above) and working their way up to successfully entangling two photons each possessing 300 units of swirl. The amount of swirl they can add to the photons is limited not by the laws of physics but by the pixel density of their Spatial Light Modulator so with better technology much larger values of "swirl" than 300 can be entangled.

Using their current setup, Fickler and company conveniently produce not just a photon with a big swirl of 300 but a photon that exists in a superposition of 300 units of clockwise swirl plus 300 units of counterclockwise swirl -- a situation I have elsewhere called "Schrödinger's Carousel".  And this (300/-300) swirled photon is quantum-entangled with a similar high-swirl photon which can be located many meters away.

However clever this achievement, a swirl of only 300 units is still much too small to be perceived by human senses. But there is an analogous phenomenon created by lots of tiny aligned spins (much more than 300) called magnetism which might someday be coaxed to produce bizarre quantum phenomena perceivable by humans.

For me one of the most elegant experiments that connects the micro-world with the macro-world is the Einstein-de Haas Effect. If you suspend a magnet on a string and demagnetize it by heating, the magnet magically begins to rotate without the application of any force. This mysterious rotation is explained by the fact that magnetism is the result of an immense number of electrons whose spins (one unit each of AM) are all aligned in the same direction. When the magnet is heated, the direction of these spins is randomized. The overall rotation is still conserved however, and is transferred from the electrons to the crystal lattice and hence the whole magnet begins to spin.

Learning how to entangle big swirls is starting in Austria with pairs of photons but perhaps, using quantum entanglement, magnets, which are already remarkable things, may someday be transformed into macroscopic quantum objects that will behave in ways that seem truly miraculous.

On another note, I've just discovered how to add a "favicon" to the URL line of my blog, and after experimenting with many complex images, have decided to use this simple "white portal" on a purple background to symbolize my quantum tantric quest to discover radically new "doorways into Nature"

New doorway into Nature?

ADDENDUM: My younger brother Duke, an ex-Marine now living in Montana, suggested THIS as a candidate image for "doorway into Nature."

Brother Duke's old doorway into Nature