New Father-and-Son Quantum Text Book

Samarkand, Uzbekistan by Richard-Karl Karlovitch Zommer

Samarkand, one of the world's oldest inhabited cities, once prospered as a trading post on the Silk Road between China and Europe. During the Islamic Golden Age (750 AD -- 1258 AD) the city became a famous focus of Arab scholarship in astronomy, medicine and mathematics. In more modern times, there graduated from the State University of Samarkand a physicist Moses Fayngold, who with his son Vadim, also a physicist, has written a new text book on quantum mechanics, intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. I found this book rich and unpredictable and, like the romantic Silk Road metropolis, offering something fresh and exotic around every corner.

Why does the world need yet another book about quantum mechanics? This question was raised by the father. "[The father], who by his own admission, used to think of himself as something of an expert in QM, was not initially impressed by the idea, citing a huge number of excellent contemporary presentations of the subject. Gradually, however, as he grew involved in discussing the issues brought up by his younger colleague, he found it hard to explain some of them even to himself. Moreover, to his surprise, in many instances he could not find satisfactory explanations even in those texts he had previously considered to contain authoritative accounts on the subject." (from the Preface).

Unlike most conventional quantum physics texts which merely explain things, this book also focuses on many of the loopholes, exceptions, imperfections, misunderstandings, man traps and pitfalls that exist in this complex field.

When you buy a new car, you will find an Owner's Manual in the glove compartment that tells you how to change the oil and how to replace the light bulbs. But if you are handy with tools you will also want to purchase the Mechanic's Manual to learn how to do things that only professionals should attempt. And, in particular, to learn things that YOU SHOULD NOT DO. (Never unscrew part A before releasing part B.)

This new quantum text book is the equivalent of a Mechanic's Manual that makes previous text books seem mere Owner's Manuals.

Most quantum text books tell you how to do things, but I have never run across a text book like Moses and Vadim's which tells you WHAT NOT TO DO. Over and over again in this text, I ran across comments to the effect that "The naive way to do this is B, but B will give you the wrong answer. Here's how to do things right." The authors seem to have anticipated many pitfalls that lie in wait for the quantum neophyte and have posted the appropriate warnings. My guess is that these pitfalls are those into which Moses and Vadim have themselves fallen. Niels Bohr once claimed that the definition of an "expert" in a field is a person who has made all the mistakes in that field. In this unusual book Moses and Vadim give you the advantage of that kind of street-smart expertise.

Their book begins by describing some major phenomena that classical physics could not explain (black-body radiation, photoelectric effect, low-temperature specific heats and atomic spectra), then show how one simple concept--the quantization of energy--could correctly reproduce these results.

Moses and Vadim then describe the origin of Louis DeBroglie's hypothesis--that matter possesses a wave-like nature whose wavelength DeBroglie could calculate. Altho this textbook confines itself to non-relativistic quantum mechanics, I was surprised (one surprise of many) to discover that DeBroglie's calculation was motivated by special relativity which means that his discovery is deeper than necessary and transcends its non-relativistic buddies such as the Schrödinger equation.

Using the DB hypothesis to physically justify energy quantization (similar to the way that resonance modes quantize the notes of stringed instruments), Moses and Vadim then use the Superposition Principle for waves to construct an "embryonic quantum mechanics" from which much more good physics can be derived without yet mentioning the Schrödinger Equation.

This book includes in-depth discussions (always accompanied by Moses and Vadim's dependable pitfall warning signs) of most of the conventional topics in quantum theory including Hilbert space, Dirac notation, angular momentum, scattering theory, band structure, quantum tunneling, density matrices, Kaon and neutrino oscillations, quantum entanglement, CHSH, POVMs, CNOT and XOR gates, the Bloch sphere, Zeno's paradox, Schrödinger's Cat, and much much more.

Moses and Vadim also introduce a novel topic they call "submissive quantum mechanics" in which they show how to manipulate potentials to create customized wave functions never before realized in nature--a useful skill that may prove profitable in the emerging field of nanotechnology.

Again and again while reading this book I got the feeling of a wise adviser at my side. The ratio of explanatory text to equations is large--resulting in a lucidity reminiscent of the classic Feynman Lectures as well as Quantum Theory by David Bohm.

Besides devising the shortest proof of Bell's theorem, Nick Herbert's main claim to physics fame is his FLASH (First Laser-Amplified Superluminal Hookup) proposal which purported to send signals faster-than-light using a "laser-like device" to clone single photons. The FLASH proposal was refuted by Wooters and Zurek who proved that "a single (unknown) photon cannot be cloned", a result which crucially limits what quantum computers can do--for instance, when quantum hard drives or quantum DVDs are built, the no-cloning theorem provides automatic copy protection courtesy of the laws of physics.

Naturally I was curious about how Moses and Vadim would deal with my FLASH proposal in their hyper-informative "Mechanic's Manual" style. In this I was not disappointed.

The authors agree that the W&Z "no perfect cloning of unknown states" proof definitively refutes my FLASH proposal. But what about "imperfect cloning"?, they ask. And what about the cloning of states that are not completely unknown but part of a small prearranged set of known states? Moses and Vadim carefully consider these loopholes (and a few more) to the standard FLASH refutation and definitively decide that FLASH won't work. But in the course of their detailed refutation the reader learns a lot about quantum cloning machines.

This book is a wonderful Mechanic's Manual crammed full of intimate details about the operation of one of the most elegant intellectual sports cars we possess--the theory of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. But in addition to this Mechanic's Manual, I urge you to also purchase an Owner's Manual of your choice, a book that you can use to solve everyday problems in simple ways. (My own favorite Owner's Manual is the classic text by Leonard Schiff from which I learned QM in those bygone days when the world's largest particle accelerator was the Berkeley Bevatron.)

But next to your trusted Owner's Manual, be sure to include this helpful Mechanic's Manual on your book shelf, both to deepen your knowledge of quantum mechanics and to help you avoid some of its more obvious pitfalls.

This book is perfect for those quantum mechanics who know how to fix Volkswagons and now want to go to work on Porsches.

New father-and-son quantum text book

Kalamidas Refuted

The three refuters of Demetrios Kalamidas

Recently Demetrios Kalamidas proposed a clever Bob-to-Alice FTL communication scheme involving a pair of path-entangled photons that passed peer review and was published in an esteemed American optics journal.

DK's scheme involved erasing Bob's which-path information by adding a number-uncertain (weak coherent) state to Bob's paths that produced an essential ambiguity as to which path the photon took. Kalamidas claimed that when this ambiguity was present at Bob's detectors, interference fringes would appear at Alice's distant detectors, without the need for a coincidence signal triggered by Bob's detector outputs. Kalamidas's scheme was not exact but involved two plausible approximations.

Several kinds of refutation were mounted to challenge the Kalamidas claim. Nick Herbert constructed a Kalamidas-inspired ambiguation scheme (2 MB pdf) involving Gray Light (x|0> + y|1>) instead of coherent states |A> which involved NO APPROXIMATIONS. Simple calculation of the EXACT Gray-Light scheme produced no FTL signals.

A different refutation by GianCarlo Ghirardi showed that if all photon operations are unitary, then an EXACT calculation shows that no FTL signaling is possible. However Ghirardi's proof is quite general and does not come to grips with the actual details of the Kalamidas scheme.

Next John Howell at University of Rochester examined a version of the Kalamidas scheme that involves adding a coherent state |A> to a single-photon Fock state |1> to create a displaced Fock state (DFS). Howell showed that an EXACT calculation of this DFS scheme leads to no FTL signaling.

However, Kalamidas's proposal is subtly different from the scheme that Howell refuted. Kalamidas's proposal adds the Fock state |1> and coherent state |A> in reverse order from Howell to produce a photon-added coherent state (PACS) rather than a DFS. Because these operations (photon addition) and (coherent state addition) do not commute, the PACS state is not the same as a DFS state.

So now a question arises: what is the correct output state (DFS or PACS) that emerges from a beam splitter when a coherent state |A> enters at one port and a Fock state |1> enters at the other?

This question was answered by Martin Suda at Austrian Institute of Technology who showed that BOTH OUTPUTS ARE CORRECT. The output of a beam splitter can be correctly described as an entanglement of DFS or of PACS states--a result I have dubbed the Martin Suda Equality. Even tho the relevant Boson operators do not commute, the Stokes relation for beam splitters "magically cancels" out the commutator and leads to this remarkable result.

So Kalamidas is correct in using PACS in his FTL proposal and Howell is also correct in using DCS in his disproof. Kalamidas uses an approximate PACS scheme; Howell's refutation uses an EXACT DCS scheme. Not yet a perfect match between proposal and refutation.

Then Christopher Gerry of Lehman College, CUNY, enters the fray with an EXACT refutation based on PACS states, concluding that "Clearly, if the exact calculation shows no interference, but the approximate calculation does, there is something wrong with the approximate calculation."

That would seem to have settled the matter, Gerry's calculation uses the same PACS states as Kalamidas and shows no FTL signaling. But, at least in my mind, one stumbling block remained: if Kalamidas's approximate calculation is wrong, then where is his mistake? Many of us have searched for this mistake (including myself, Howell, Suda and Gerry) without success.

Now I believe I have found it--not a mistake, but a way of looking at the Kalamidas proposal that exposes its crucial flaw.

Suppose (since none of us can refute it), that Kalamidas's calculation is correct. He has found an approximation scheme that yields true FTL signaling. What this means is that, if you coincidence-trigger on all Bob's terms of the Kalamidas approximation, you will generate interference in Alice's detectors.

But, even assuming Kalamidas's calculation is correct, he still loses the game, because for his scheme to work (since it is only approximate) it necessarily requires coincidence triggering. Because we know from the results of Ghirardi, Howell and Gerry, that the EXACT calculations show no sign of FTL signaling.

Therefore, using his own criterion (no coincidence triggering), the Kalamidas scheme must fail.

Besides the excitement generated by his clever new FTL signaling scheme, and a renewed excuse to delve into the details of Boson calculus, the most notable outcome of the Kalamidas affair seems to have been the discovery of the surprising "Martin Suda Equality".

Three by Kenneth Patchen

Who are you

Who are you
Watching out of the water lily
Watching out of the oak tree
Daughter of the linnet's waking
Draughtsman of the tempest's oath
Who are you
Watching out of the wounded fawn
Watching out of the frolicking hare
O designer of what awesome tidings

Alan Ginsberg & Kenneth Patchen

The artist's duty

So it is the duty of the artist to discourage 
all traces of shame

To extend all boundaries

To fog them in right over the plate

To kill only what is ridiculous

To establish problems

To ignore solutions

To listen to no one

To omit nothing

To contradict everything

To generate the free brain

To bear no cross

To take part in no crucifixion

To tinkle a warning when mankind strays

To explode upon all parties

To wound deeper than the soldier

To heal this poor obstinate monkey 
once and for all



To verify the irrational

To exaggerate all things

To inhabit everyone

To lubricate each proportion

To experience only experience



To set a flame in the high air

To expose himself to every ridicule
To have kids with pretty angels
To display his dancing seed
To exclaim at the commonplace alone

To cause the unseen eyes to open



To admire only the absurd

To be concerned with every profession 
save his own

To raise a fortuitous stink 
on the boulevards of truth and beauty

To desire an electrifiable intercourse 
with a female alligator

To lift the flesh above the suffering

To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit


To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss



To HAPPEN



It is the artist’s duty to be alive

To drag people into glittering occupations



To blush perpetually in gaping innocence

To drift happily 
through the ruined race-intelligence

To burrow beneath the subconscious

To defend the unreal at the cost of his reason

To obey each outrageous impulse

To commit his company to all enchantments. 

Booker Ervin & Kenneth Patchen

The sea is awash with roses

The sea is awash with roses O they blow
Upon the land

The still hills fill with their scent
O the hills flow on their sweetness
As on God's hand

O love, it is so little we know of pleasure
Pleasure that lasts as the snow

But the sea is awash with roses O they blow
Upon the land

Fifth Anniversary

Nick Herbert June 2013 (photo by Reno De Caro)

This month marks the fifth year of my Quantum Tantra blog -- five years of posting things that piqued my curiosity enough to respond in print. See here for the Quantum Tantra Blog origin story.

Quantum tantra is Nick's project to connect with nature in a brand-new way--direct, unmediated and sensual--using techniques informed by quantum physics. I am looking for hints, handholds, shortcuts to begin my ascent, but have been confronted so far with a sheer face, so up till now have been just singing around the campfire with good companions waiting for that one flash of inspiration that will nudge humanity into beginning its next big climb (or will it be a descent?).

Some of this year's top campfire songs include Just Ask Isaac, Seven Reconfigured Sacraments, Quantum Theology, Happy YIDD, Kiss my Bare Art and Greatest Pleasure by Nick plus Applesauce for Eve by Marge Piercy and What You Should Know by Gary Snyder.

And while we are waiting, we also write books. I recently published a second collection of my songs in Harlot Nature. Richard Grossinger produced Dark Pool of Light his splendid three-volume magnum opus on consciousness. Rudy Rucker republished a too-little-appreciated first person account of the early days of the psychedelic era, William Craddock's Be Not Content. Ethnobotonist Dale Pendell wrote a book of verse celebrating the magical runes of physics Equations of Power. And just yesterday, too soon for review, Dennis McKenna gave me a copy of Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, Dennis's account of his and his more famous sibling's encounters with mind-altering molecules.

2013 saw the death of Bruce Eisner, a psychedelic pioneer and author of a book on MDMA, and the tenth anniversary of the death of my wife Betsy Rose Rasumny, one of the most extraordinary creatures I have ever met.

This year Lynden Stone, an artist in Queensland, Australia revived my Metaphase Spirit Typewriter as an art project both in Australia and Philadelphia. I also rigged a makeshift observatory on my Boulder Creek deck to photograph a rare Transit of Venus and was filmed on the same deck for a new movie Supernature about the history of Esalen Institute. On the performance side of things, my Irish band Blarney made a few appearances in Santa Cruz and my Urge: a Short Opera about Reality topped 1000 viewers on YouTube.

This year's most exciting project by far was working with Demetrios Kalamidas who proposed a novel scheme using pairs of path-entangled photons to signal faster-than light. See here, here and here. Kalamidas's clever FTL signaling scheme passed peer review and was published in a major American journal of optical physics. Several physicists, including myself, have scrutinized his scheme and constructed disproofs of various sorts. Now we know for certain that the Kalamidas scheme can't possibly work. However, all the various disproofs are either very general or disprove schemes that are not precisely what Kalamidas has proposed.

So the quantum optics community is faced with a peculiar challenge. "Since you are certain I am wrong," says Kalamidas, "it should be 'easy pickins' for one of you to find my mistake."

And there the situation remains. Everyone (including Demetrios himself) knows he is wrong, but no one can yet show exactly where his physics or his math goes off the tracks.

Kalamidas has done the impossible

Refutation should be precise, swift, and strong

We physicists know this can't happen

So where is Demetrios wrong?

Just Ask Isaac

Isaac Newton

JUST ASK ISAAC
(for Ruth Kastner)

And where lies the Source of Gravity--
That draws to Earth both Moon and dingo?
"Beats me," spake the smartest man alive:
"Hypotheses non fingo."

Now Vicar Sacks is here to ask:
Sir, does your mother cheat at Bingo?
The Master of the Mint just scowled:
"Hypotheses non fingo."

Tell us, Lord, which is thy fave:
John or George or Paul or Ringo?
The Principia's author merely sneered:
"Hypotheses non fingo."

Professor, what do women want?
Can you uncrypt their alien lingo?
Newt pulled his cowl across his face:
"Hypotheses non fingo."

PROWESS

PROWESS June 14, 2013 Santa Crux, CA

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FTL Signaling Made Easy

Demetrios Kalamidas: Prove me wrong or turn in your PhDs

When I was getting my undergraduate degree at Ohio State University, physics and math classes took up a lot of my time. But when preposterous claims were brought to our attention, me and my friends always seemed to find time to check them out. Two such claims stand out in my memory. The first was a curious explanation for why trees can grow taller than 30 ft. If trees raise water by pulling a vacuum by evaporating water from their leaves, then atmospheric pressure (15 lbs/square inch) is insufficient to push a column of water higher than thirty feet. Yet outside my door there are redwoods effortlessly growing to five times that height. The explanation offered to "explain trees" was that thin water columns could support "negative" pressure and hence surpass the "natural limit to growth". This could be checked by trying to lift a mercury column to a greater height than 760 mm by placing water on top of the mercury and evaporating it thru a sintered-glass funnel. We had all these thing in the physics lab, so a few of us built an "artificial tree" and were surprised to see that after a few days of evaporization, the mercury column was indeed much higher than the "natural limit" suggested by  naive arguments based on air pressure.

At about the same time Edmund Land, the inventor of polaroid film and the Polaroid camera, announced that he could produce full-color images with only two colors rather than the three colors required by the conventional models of color vision. Land had his best results with the color yellow and white. So, following Land's recipe, we made black and white transparencies thru the appropriate filters, then projected these two negatives thru two slide projectors one of whose lenses we covered with a yellow filter. And sure enough we found that, contrary to received belief, yellow and white light could produce blue, green and red sensations on our retinas. The colors were not faithful, but, by Zeus they were there!

That was in the 50s at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

A few years ago I was talking to a physics professor at a California university, which shall remain unnamed, about a preposterous parapsychology experiment called "autonomic presentiment" and wondered if any of the students in his school had tried to reproduce its results which seemed to show that certain physiological measures such as skin resistance or heart beat changed a few seconds before an emotional picture appeared on a computer but not when a calm picture appeared. Surely someone in the psychology department or the physics department would possess the intellectual curiosity, I guessed, to check out these preposterous claims.

"Intellectual curiosity?" my friend replied. "What's that? The only thing these students are looking for are good jobs."

Recently another preposterous claim appeared on the physics radar and attracted my attention. Demetrios Kalamidas, who graduated from CCNY and worked in laser labs, came up with a faster-than-light signaling scheme based on quantum optics. Kalamidas's scheme passed peer review and was published in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America B (an arXiv preprint is available here.) His proposal was received with a deafening silence.

Since I have some experience with FTL signaling schemes, I supposed that I could easily refute the Kalamidas proposal. I devised my own version of his scheme and after some effort was able to establish that (my version of the) Kalamidas scheme would not work. So far so good.

Armed with this comforting result, I reformulated the original Kalamidas scheme using my own notation and confidently proceeded to disprove it--without success. In fact I actually discovered a way to improve Kalamidas's scheme that raises his original fringe visibility from 9% to 22%. My paper (with the new improved FTL signaling scheme) is available here.

The Kalamidas experiment uses hardware found in every modern optics lab and every process Kalamidas cites has been achieved tho never in the combination he envisions. However before any hardware is actually assembled to test his claims, it is important to remember that a thought experiment is less expensive than a real experiment. And the conceptual elements needed to test Kalamidas's scheme inside the mind are available to most every physics graduate student, are openly published in every modern optics book and are present in extremely high concentration in the minds of hundreds of scientists working in modern optics labs around the world.

But months have gone by without a peep from the professionals.

The Kalamidas scheme is begging to be refuted. And thousands of people exist who are intellectually over-equipped to do so. But, if my unnamed professor of physics is right, then Demetrios Kalamidas need not worry. The one factor today's generation of physicists seems to be missing is this: sheer intellectual curiosity.

Prove me wrong, punk. Make my day.

Equations of Power

Equations of Power Exiled-in-America Press 2013

The alchemists and old magicians believed that certain words and symbols had power over nature. And in their secret books they inscribed runes, spells, charms which when spoken aloud in the proper circumstances could influence both matter and mind.

Today's scientists also possess (not-so-secret) books written in the special language of mathematics. The spells and charms in these books exert their power not by being spoken aloud but by providing detailed maps of the physical world that can take us places we would otherwise never be able to go.

The "magic" of modern physics resides in a few basic equations which are usually confined to scientific circles. Now psychobotanist Dale Pendell breaks these equations out of their scientific contexts and turns them into verse. Pendell is best known for his Pharmako Trilogy, a deep and original study of mind-altering plant-based substances from coffee, thru cannabis, to Ecstasy and LSD. His work includes a novel The Great Bay, a book about Burning Man (Inspired Madness) and several other books and essays some of which can be found on his website.  Pendell has a clear and distinctive poetic voice which has been likened to William Blake, Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers.

The big stars of Equations of Power are Schrödinger's and Maxwell's equations from physics. But Pendell's widely cast net also hauls up the chemistry of gunpowder (The Fire Drug) and of bronze (The Bronze Sword), the natural forces that form serpentine rock and the nautilus shell, nuclear physics, the equivalence of energy and mass and Consciousness Explained. Here are some excerpts from Pendell's new book plus the short poem The Wave Collapse, in which Pendell ponders the central mystery of quantum theory--how do quantum possibility waves "collapse" to form the world's actual facts?

Schrödinger's Wave Equation

...

Erwin Schrödinger spent the night

in adulterous fornication

with his mistress.

By morning he was thinking

about waves

...

Wave being wife, or,

on that night, close enough,

the good physicist assumed 

that the energy of the whole thing

was conserved--that a push here

created an equal and opposite

pull there.

...

The Fire Drug

...

The violence of the mixture was noted--

some burned faces and a burned-down house.

It took another century or two of experiment,

continually increasing the proportion of nitre--

it seemed impossible to add too much.

At three-quarters, the mixture exploded.

This was new.  They called it huo yao: the fire-drug,

In a bamboo tube, fire shot from the end--

they were strapped to the tips of spears,

launched as rockets, or sealed as bombs.

...

The Wave Collapse

On the beach where I grew up

     long shore break--

the huge combers breaking

     all at once--

sometime with

     a loud crack

the water

     pulled and stretched

the hollow tube like a

     tunnel of light

barely a foot of water, the

     sand sucked skyward

for one extended and suspended

     moment, different

from the crash of the water

     against the beach sand,

which, at night,

     would shake the house.

One wonders

     how chlorophyll

can be so quiet

     snatching fire

from the sun.

Dale Pendell, the psychobotany guy

Seven Reconfigured Sacraments

Et introibo ad altare Dei.

SEVEN RECONFIGURED SACRAMENTS

1. The Sacrament of Reality
There is no God but Unnamable Mystery;
Any other god is nothing before This.

2. The Sacrament of Baptism
When I first realized
That I was going to die.

3. The Sacrament of Confirmation
The times I recognize
Another of my tribe.

4. The Sacrament of Confession
I did it
And I'm glad.

5. The Sacrament of Thankfulness
This impulse of gratitude
For the complex living paradox
Of my own existence
And the existence of everything else.

And for wonderful companions.

6. The Sacrament of Communion
The times I spent
Alone and naked
With one of the opposite sex.
And everything that came from this.

7. The Sacrament of Love
I will love the Unnamable Mystery
And all of Her lesser Mysteries.
With my whole heart
I will love every part.

Nick Gets a Spiral CAT Scan

Nick after release from Dominican Hospital

The Friday before Good Friday 2013, I was bringing up my laundry from under the deck, a vertical distance of less than 30 feet, when suddenly I felt like I was back on Mt Shasta--I could hardly breathe, and my heart was racing. I put down the laundry and rested. Back to normal, I did what anyone else would do--I hoped it would just go away. But it didn't. So I decided to see my doctor a few days later on Monday. He checked me out, advised a few blood tests and chest X-ray in Santa Cruz. I returned in the evening from Santa Cruz to my doctor's phone message (he had received the blood results) to call him immediately. I decided to wait till morning but in his second phone call he advised me in person to go to Dominican Hospital immediately. I called my friend Reno who drove me (about 10 PM Monday) to the Emergency Room at Dominican.

We signed in. And waited. And waited. Due to the large numbers of Americans who lack Health Insurance, all hospital Emergency Rooms in the USA have become doctor's offices of last resort. And consequently Dominican Hospital's ER is not a swift emergency treatment center but a de facto doctor's waiting room.

Reno and I waited some more and finally (around midnight) were instructed to fill out forms and wait some more--this time inside a large room to which nurses and doctors had access. I was tagged with an orange wrist band with name, number and bar code. A nurse's aide arrived with a machine on wheels to take my "vital signs"--blood pressure, pulse rate, temperature and blood-oxygen level. As long as I stayed at the hospital, I could count on some woman with a vital-signs cart arriving every few hours to take these measurements. The numbers showed up on her cart in great big digital displays. I noticed that my blood pressure was unusually high, mostly I guessed, because I was scared because I didn't yet know "what was wrong" with me.

Nick wrist-tagged at Space Station Dominic

Now it was early Tuesday morning, in a dimly lit room somewhere in the bowels of Dominican hospital. Except for my birth and a few outpatient experiences, I have never spent time as a patient inside a hospital so I decided to open my sensors and pay attention.

The first thing I noticed was that no one wore uniforms. The doctors, nurses and nurse's aides wore clothes that ranged from somewhat glamorous, to causal, to individualized, veri-colored, fashion-trimmed variations on traditional nurse's uniforms. The only white lab coats I saw at Dominican were worn by the men and women in the pharmacies.

Everyone seemed to be wearing clothes of their choice. But the official people were separated from the patients by the cluster of security cards they wore pinned to their bodies. These costumes reminded me of my times in physics labs like Los Alamos where the staff wore whatever they pleased but everyone without exception wore some sort of photo ID. I felt right at home (at the St. Dominic's Linear Accelerator Center). The only difference was that at St Dominic's, there were more women with badges than at Los Alamos.

Because of my symptoms and blood results, the docs had scheduled me for a Spiral CAT scan of my lungs. But that required a lot of waiting in the basement of the "accelerator center." Now it was long after midnight, and the "night people" began to emerge from their warrens. A nurse wearing a tight black gown, flashy jewelry and a surgical mask stopped by to chat with us waiters. My vitals were taken again as well as some blood samples.

More nurses in different outfits (one an intern, working for zero$$ on a 12-hour shift) arrived and prepared me for the CAT scan. This involved fitting my right arm with an IV shunt through which various liquids could be conveniently inserted into Nick's circulatory system.

We waited some more. Finally (around 3AM) I was loaded onto a gurney, shot up thru my IV shunt with an X-ray contrast liquid (probably sodium iodide) and wheeled into the CAT scan room.

Which looked like something out of Star Trek--a white doughnut-shaped ring (made by Siemens) into which my body was transported on a motor-driven bed. The entire scan took only a few minutes.

The results came just as fast but I was returned to the dim-lit waiting room to await a doctor who was qualified to interpret the scan. When Doctor "Matthew" finally arrived, Reno and I asked to see the pictures. They showed up on a gigantic screen but were indeed as incomprehensible to a layman as the pictures from a particle accelerator.

My stay at Dominican taught me the meaning of two new medical terms--"thrombosis" and "embolism". "Thrombosis" means the formation of a blood clot. And "embolism" means "blockage",
from the Greek word for "insertion". Nick's Spiral CAT scan showed that he had a blood clot (thrombus) in his lungs--a condition known as PE (pulmonary embolism).

But not just one clot. Dr Matthew used the word "bilateral" which means I had at least one clot in each lung. When we looked at the scan, Dr Matthew pointed out some of the embolisms on that cross-section, then shifted to another cross-section and pointed out other embolisms. "What about this?" I asked, pointing to a gray part of the picture. "O yes, that's an embolism too." Reno used the term "shotgun" to describe his layman's impression of the condition of my lungs.

On the basis of this CAT scan image, Dr Matthew admitted me to Dominican Hospital for further observation. And Reno left to catch a few hours sleep before he had to to get up and take his son to school.

Map of human circulatory system

After Reno left,  I waited for awhile until I was assigned a room (1222) in a part of the hospital called "the Overflow". I was wheeled to my room but by now it was dawn and the hospital was going into day shift.

Nick's diagnosis was Pulmonary Embolism (PE). Somewhere in my body, blood clots (thombi) had formed, and were carried to my lungs (see "pulmonary arteries" above) where they were forming blockages (embolisms) to my normal breathing. Barring drastic measures, these embolisms could not be removed. However my body's normal processes, over a time scale of several months, would remove them naturally.

The obvious next step was to determine the source (or sources) of the blood clots. The usual suspects are wounds to the lower legs.

Before I had had a chance to sleep, I was probed by a new series of Star-Trek-like machines. Wheeled into a room where an enthusiastic redhead named "Melody", applied a combination of ultrasound and deep Esalen massage to my bare legs. She would locate a vein on her imaging device, then press down till that image disappeared. If the vein's image failed to disappear no matter how hard she pushed, then the probable cause was the presence of a blood clot inside the vein. The best part was that I could watch all this on the screen while it was happening. Melody conscientiously probed both my legs with her sonic massage tool but found only one blood clot--inside my left knee. She and her machine found no probable cause for my bilateral pulmonary embolisms.

Back in Room 1222, I was given "blood thinners" both oral (xarelto?) and via shots in my stomach (lovenox?) to prevent the further formation of clots. Six electrodes were placed on my chest and hooked via an electrode harness to a heart-lung monitor over my bed which was in turn linked to the nurse's station in Overflow. Suffering from lack of sleep, isolated in an unfamiliar, high-tech couch, hooked to an electro-sensing machine, I felt (except for the high gravity and good air) that I was floating inside Space Station Dominic high above the Earth.

After breakfast (pancakes and bacon), a nice dark-haired lady arrived with an echo-cardiogram machine. With this device we both could see into my living heart (!!!). From many angles. I was fascinated. On the screen of nice lady's echo machine, my heart looked less like the pictures in an anatomy book, and more like the cross-section of some intricate marine creature pulsing with the rhythm of the sea. Via this method of imaging, my heart did not appear tough and robust, but delicate and vulnerable, able to be swept away at any moment into the depths.

After viewing my heart from many directions, both in black-and-white and color (Doppler-imaging), the echo tech informed me that she found no serious abnormalities. Most notably she saw no blood clots inside the little sea creature that moves Nick's blood.

I spent the rest of the day (Tuesday) having blood drawn and vital signs taken, being interviewed by a doctor from India and finally getting my first night's sleep in two days.

After breakfast (omelet) and more tests of blood and vitals, I was visited by a nurse's aide around noon who tested my vital signs while we briskly walked the hospital's halls. This test suggested that despite my embolisms I could function normally without stressing my system. Later that day I was given a prescription for a blood thinner (xarelto by Bayer) and discharged around 6 PM.

Although I was happy to exit Space Station Dominic, I was pleased with the careful attention of the staff and their cheerful and friendly attitude under stressful conditions. In my haste to get back home as soon as possible I neglected to obtain a copy of my CAT scan. Instead I am posting an image from a website that publishes nothing but pictures of cats cavorting on flat-bed scanners.

From "thecatscan.tumblr.com"