A Nobel Prize for Nick

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

Happy Birthday, Quantum Tantra Blog!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do Men Want?

from Japanese EIZO X-ray pinup calendar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill for a Birth

(click to expand)

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

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

The total bill? $40.00.

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

Harlot Nature (2)

Night on Pandora (from James Cameron's Avatar)

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


HARLOT NATURE

I have heard that Nature's a harlot

Legs open and flat on Her back

That She's naked, unbridled and shameless

And prone to unnatural acts

And prone to unnatural acts.

Can I smother Your prairies with asphalt?

Can I murder the fish in Your seas?

Can I milk all the oils from Your body?

Can I make You make money for me?

Can I make You make money for me?

The hungriest whore has her limits

Every prostitute minds her taboos

Is Nature a slut without scruples?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

Can I shit in the veins of Your body?

Can I suck all Your aquifers dry?

Can I strip off Your beautiful jungles?

Order more of Your species to die?

Order more of Your species to die?

The hungriest whore has her limits

Every prostitute minds her taboos

Is Nature a slut without scruples?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

Is there nothing that She wouldn't do?

How to Quantum-Entangle Human Beings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tantric Table of the Elements (7)

Tantric Table of the Elements: Revision #7 (Click to enlarge)
See also Elements of Tantra and 99 Names of Goddess.
An earlier version of this table
was exhibited at
The Poet's Eye/The Artist's Tongue Show
at Mountain Arts Center in Ben Lomond. CA.

I welcome suggestions for new elements.

Egad! It's an iPad!

Hardware: Allan Lundell, Awake Media Team and KSCO's "Dr Future"
Photography: Reno DeCaro

Time Slave

John Norman is a writer of speculative fiction whose concerns are mainly male/female relations. Norman's work has been widely criticized by feminists and his work described as grossly unrealistic male fantasy fiction--the male counterpart of female romance fantasy. The fact that romance novels sell in the millions means that something in romance fantasy touches some unsatisfied part of the female soul. Likewise with Norman's male fantasy fiction. What is lacking in today's men? What does it mean to be a "real male"? A close reading of popular male/female fantasies, I feel, cannot help but shed a fresh light on actual male/female reality. Time Slave is a kind of Clan of the Cave Bear for men.

Rereading Norman's Time Slave I was moved to write a review but felt I could not surpass this Amazon piece by Don G. Schley (doktor don) which I excerpt here:

"Time Slave offers a fresh, new venue for Norman to present the degradation of human dignity in the grey web of modern, sterile Western civilization, where men are emasculated and women have lost their femininity.

In Time Slave, the brilliant and driven Danish scientist, Herjellsen, lures his colleague, the beautiful mathematician, Dr. Brenda Hamilton from Cal Tech, to work on a project in Africa. This project is the construction of a time machine, and Herjellsen's secret purpose is to send someone back in time to "rectify a mistake" in man's genetic heritage. This person, it turns out, is Dr. Hamilton. There, stripped and kept in a cell in the bush, tormented and threatened with sexual assault by Gunther, Herjellsen's German assistant, she is finally sent back to the Cro-Magnon period without any real knowledge of her goal.

There she is captured by a strong hunter from a Tribe called simply "the Men", who are a hunter-gatherer group competing with (and struggling against) other groups such as primitive herdsmen, and the contemptible "weasel people". Hamilton's adjustment to life in the camp, and the shock of her lowly status, take a toll on her modern pretensions. Nonetheless, Tree, the hunter who captured her in the first place, works to make Hamilton into a real woman, in touch with her senses, and alive to the strong sensuality that flows within her being. Indeed, it is through her subjugation to the men of the Tribe, and especially through the efforts of her lover, Tree, that Hamilton recovers her true sense of womanhood, and becomes a full-fledged woman of "the Men" and a member of the Tribe...

Despite what I perceive as a flaw in logic [Norman's fictional scientists believe what humanity needs is an injection of modern genes rather than more Cro-Magnon DNA], Time Slave forces the reader to think about what has become of the strong genes of hunter-gatherer groups that survived and even prospered to propagate the race in that world of pre-civilization. Moreover, this new setting gives Norman a chance to raise the issue of a "natural philosophy" afresh, and with new elements. For instance, Time Slave has as a major undercurrent, man's need to explore, to transcend his current reality, and ultimately to reach to the stars...

Today's soft, Western world is too busy creating the socialist caretaker state to invest the time and energy necessary for space travel. Instead, we promulgate a system that rewards and supports those least genetically capable of survival in the natural realm (those who comprise the welfare class) while withdrawing support from the adventurous who reflect our true ancestry and with whom the future of humanity lies. Norman depicts modern humanity as torn between the proponents of security, who would stifle and shut off the risk-taking necessary for our long-term survival as a species, and those few bold persons who retain within their make-up the heritage of hunters, adventurers, explorers, and Masters ...

Today, public funding of NASA projects is increasingly doubtful, more and more persons cry for intensive socialization, strong aggressive and even defensive behaviors are being "trained" out of American males through the public school systems, with their "zero-tolerance" policies and enforced administration of drugs such as Ritalin to settle boys down. In such an era, Time Slave is a must-read for the man and woman who do not want to be lost in this world of insipid and meaningless routine, where conformity to idiotic, commercial-generated norms and the pursuit of existence for its own sake have replaced the struggle to survive and remain strong. I thus recommend this book to everyone who shares Norman's prescient insight into the pathology of modern civilization, and into the fading but still present virtue of our natural genetic heritage."

Caution: As with any other myth concerning the relations between men and women, Norman's work needs to be taken with a very big grain of salt.

Natura Naturans

Natura Naturans

The other night on ecstasy
God the Father spoke to me:

Do you covet Natura Naturans?
I really hope you do.
I fell in love with Her myself
When time and space were new.

Out of inexplicable nothingness
I struck the primal spark.
I barely knew what I was doing.
I was working in the dark.

Do you covet Natura Naturans?
I really hope you do.
I fell in love with my own creation
When time and space were new.

So please see, hear, smell and taste Her
Caress Her Highness dusk to dawn
With new quantum senses She will teach you
When you get your mojo on.

Do you covet Natura Naturans?
I really hope you do.
I fell in love with Her myself
When time and space were new.