Quantum Theology

The Holy Trinity: Three Persons in One God

The early Catholic church taught that there were two paths to discovering the Nature of God--Revelation and the study of nature. Revelation includes the teachings of the church itself which include such mysteries as the Holy Trinity--the notion that God (Deus) was one being consisting of three separate Persons: Father (Pater), Son (Filius) and Holy Spirit (Spiritus). The figure above, which appears in most Catholic catechisms, declares that the Father is not (non est) the Son, and the Son is not (non est) the Spirit. But both the Son and the Father are (est) God. Various analogies have been used to illustrate this Mystery, from the union of three candle flames to Saint Patrick holding up a shamrock. When I went to school I was told that the Trinity was a mystery no human could understand-- an intellectual tactic similar to the popular "shut up and calculate" "explanation" of Quantum Reality.

Revelation also includes the direct experience of God by individual mystics. But this Path was not encouraged by the Church both because it threatened the Church's teaching monopoly and because such personal revelations could be contaminated by human frailties and desires. Although I spent four years studying theology and other topics at a Catholic prep school, we never once discussed the revelations of any mystic. However in the St Charles Borromeo library I discovered the classic mystical text "Dark Night of the Soul" by St John of the Cross. After reading this book cover to cover, I decided that if this was what it meant to be a mystic, then mysticism was not for Nick. Much later in life I experimented with psychedelics--following Blessed Terence McKenna's dictum: "Now even bad people can see God."--and directly experienced many of the paradoxes of consciousness that up till then I had only read about. Not only are the mysteries of Body, Mind and God intellectually complex, I concluded, they are often flat-out terrifying.

The second Path to God is through the study of the world. If God indeed created everything like an artist creates a painting, song or sculpture, then one might hope to learn about the psychology of the artist by looking as deeply as possible at the details of that artist's work--an endeavor called Natural Theology. Albert Einstein when he said: "I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon. I want to know God's thoughts--the rest are mere details." was speaking as a Natural Theologian.

Today the practice of Natural Theology has taken a peculiar turn. Physicists have discovered the Secret of the Universe. We now possess the equations that accurately predict the results of every phenomenon we are able to observe in the laboratory--equations that are only beginning to change our world through classically-impossible new technologies such as lasers and computer chips. The Secret of the Universe is called Quantum Theory which gives us unprecedented control of the Quantum Facts. However the price physicists pay for this triumph is steep--we must give up Quantum Reality. We are no longer able to tell a plausible story about WHAT IS HAPPENING when a Quantum Fact appears. And the world we see is made of nothing but Quantum Facts. Werner Heisenberg expressed this awkward situation thus: "Our conception of the objective reality of elementary particles has evaporated in a curious way--not into the fog of some new, obscure or not yet understood reality concept but into the transparent clarity of a new mathematics."

When I was eight years old, I was initiated into another way to experience God--by taking Him directly into my body--by swallowing at Mass a piece of bread whose "substance" had been changed by the words of the priest into the substance of God. This Church explained this miracle in terms of a Medieval physics in which all matter consists of an invisible "substance" to which are attached visible and palpable "accidents"--accidents such as "white, thin, two inches around, etc". When the priest says his magic words the bread's accidents remain the same but the bread's invisible substance is changed into the substance of God--hence the term "transubstantiation" that refers to the physics of the Eucharist.

Priest in Philadelphia turning bread into the Body of God

What an odd concept, that God might not dwell in a far-away heaven, but might take residence in a piece of bread. And bending the doctrine a bit, God might not just invisibly inhabit the substance of the consecrated Host, but the substance of all matter, however lowly. God, or some aspect of God, might be invisibly present beneath everything. God, or some foretaste of God, might be teasing us by appearing to physicists as Quantum Reality.


If it's God who's running the quantum theater, He/She certainly behaves like a showoff. Almost every sort of contradiction we can think of, God (or nature) effortlessly combines without anything exploding. The quantum world is both analog and digital, both fully deterministic and utterly random, combines both wave and particle in a single phenomenon. And lately God's showing off Her chops in the hot new arena of quantum entanglement. If you're keen to explore the quantum entanglement chapter of Natural Theology, then get thee to a modern optics lab.

Quantum optics experiment: Can the bizarre behavior of light reveal the hidden nature of God?

One of the most beautiful examples of quantum entanglement is the GHZ experiment--named after three physicists, Goldberger, Horne and Zeilinger. In the GHZ setup three photons A, B, and C are emitted from a common source (labeled GHZ in the picture below). These photons travel in three different directions (oriented somewhat like a Mercedes symbol) to three distant lab stations where Alice, Bob and Charlie are prepared to measure the spin direction of their particular A, B or C photon. This being quantum mechanics, Alice cannot just "measure" the pre-existing spin of her A photon. Alice must chose a direction and the photon will respond with spin pointing entirely along that direction ("spin-up") or entirely opposite that direction ("spin-down"). Although before being measured, Alice's photon could have pointed in any direction on a sphere (an analog quantity), Alice's action forces that photon to make a digital choice. The Quantum Reality dilemma consists of the fact that although we can perfectly predict the results of the GHZ experiment, we are unable to formulate a plausible story about WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING at Alice's photon detector. We are equally ignorant about WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING at all photon detectors anywhere in the Universe including the photon detectors in your eyes that make it possible for you to read this page.

A photon is said to be in a spin "eigenstate" if there is a direction Alice can choose where that photon will register spin-up 100% of the time. When a photon is in a eigenstate, it makes sense to say that photon A is spinning in a definite direction. It is easy to put photons in spin eigenstates. A pair of polarized sunglasses can do the job.

However the three GHZ photons are not produced in eigenstates but in a state of spin entanglement. "Quantum Entanglement" is impossible to describe in classical terms. The three GHZ photon no longer possess the property "spin" on their own. The only entity that possesses a definite spin is the entire three-photon system all at once. Thus photon A is "not spinning", photon B is "not spinning",
photon C is "not spinning". But the system as a whole has a definite spin. The GHZ arrangement bears a vague resemblance to the mystery of the Holy Trinity--it's completely incomprehensible to the human mind, what nature is doing with these three photons. However the GHZ mystery differs from the mystery of the Trinity in that the GHZ mystery is not just words in a book--it's the sort of thing that ordinary light does every day. Today's physicists are only at the beginning of our exploration of Quantum Reality. Likewise today's natural theologians have only begun to appreciate the handiwork of the Universe's inhumanly eccentric artist.

At the beginning of the 21st Century, our knowledge of matter is deep and sophisticated--our knowledge of mind and of God shallow and primitive. When experiments and theories about mind, when experiments and theories about God begin to match the sophistication of our experiments and theories about matter, only then will we be able to enjoy the fruits of a true quantum theology.

QUANTUM THEOLOGY

Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and Jew,
Bacterium, bobcat, skunk, kangaroo,
Photon, electron, spins even and odd
Is what lies under this the Substance of God?

Most old-fashioned concepts of God 
were not so astute--
Story-book Yahwehs and Wotans 
for Richard Dawkins to refute.
Now science has shown us that Nature deep down
Turns human ideas of reason and logic around.

If Quantum Reality gives us glimpse of Divine
Then Her everyday acts defy human design.
Each quantum event in the Universe grand
Hides a magnificent miracle we don't understand.

Holy Trinity is kid's play compared to GHZ
A common ho-hum triple-photon mystery.
If Nature works marvels in stuff deaf and blind
How is She handling the Mystery of Mind?

Perhaps God's not a Goon who holds all the Aces
But a mystery inside our most intimate places.
Maybe Her Mind & yours are as close as a shave
Mad, goofy-entangled--like particle/wave.

The GHZ experiment: Three photons in one entanglement

The Kalamidas Experiment

Nick calculating the Kalamidas effect (NKE)

Recently Demetrios Kalamidas, a young New York quantum-optics physicist, proposed an imaginative new superluminal signaling scheme--OKE (see also KISS and Demetrios! the Opera). The Kalamidas experiment proposes for Bob to send instant signals to Alice via the medium of a pair of path-entangled photons (A and B).

When Bob knows (from observation of his photon B) which path Alice's A photon took, then Alice cannot observe two-path interference. But if Bob can erase which-path information then, in principle, Alice can get her path-uncertain photon to interfere with itself.

Switching between these two options (knowledge of Alice's photon's path and erasure of that knowledge) Bob can instantly send a signal to Alice no matter how large the distance that separates them. So goes the argument for FTL signaling via quantum entanglement.

In my analysis of the Kalamidas experiment: NKE (caution: 2-MB pdf download), I consider three possible choices that Bob could make to either obtain or erase which-path info concerning Alice's photon A.

I call these three choices: 1. the Fock Choice; 2. the Frost choice and 3. the Kalamidas choice. The Fock choice preserves which-path info and both the Frost choice and the Kalamidas choice erase which-path info—but in two different ways.

The Frost-choice method for quantum-erasure of which-path info is well-known—scramble Bob's two paths in a beam splitter. This choice does indeed lead to interference of Alice's photons. But this interference is INVISIBLE because it is superposed with an exactly complementary anti-interference pattern, the sum of which produces a completely random signal at Alice's detectors. These two patterns (signal and anti-signal) can however be separated by a coincidence trigger from Bob that tells Alice which of Bob's two detectors fired. If detector B1 went off then Alice sees a signal; if detector B2 went off, then Alice sees an anti-signal.

So (making the Frost choice) Bob's erasure of which-path info does indeed produce interference at Alice's detectors but ALICE'S INTERFERENCE IS ENCRYPTED using a random key that Bob can only send by conventional slower-than-light methods. Hence the Frost choice fails as a superluminal signaling device.

What about the Kalamidas choice?

The gist of the Kalamidas experiment is the novel method he has invented for Bob to quantum-erase which-path info. In his original article: OKE = Original Kalamidas Experiment, Kalamidas demonstrates that his method leads to UNENCRYPTED INTERFERENCE at Alice's detectors. Hence it appears that Demetrios Kalamidas has devised a viable mechanism for sending signals faster-than-light. Furthermore all of the components of the Kalamidas device are available in most modern quantum-optics labs. No exotic processes needed—everything in principle is completely understood.

For his FTL machine, Kalamidas employs an unusual method for which-path erasure. Bob "ambiguifies"  the number of photons in each of his two paths by mixing each photon (which is normally in a "Fock state" of definite photon number—either zero or one) with a state of uncertain photon number. In Kalamidas's original paper (OKE), he used for this number-uncertain state a truncated coherent state. In Nick's version of the Kalamidas experiment (NKE), I use a state |U> = x|0> + y|1> (which I call "gray light") as my number-uncertain input.

The beam-splitter math for the NKE experiment is simple but tedious—30 terms that must be carefully squared, added together and matched correctly with the right output detectors. The first time I carried out this calculation, I verified Kalamidas's claim: Bob, by his choice of what to measure could seemingly cause: 1. nothing to happen at Alice's detectors or 2. unencrypted interference to happen at Alice's detectors with a very large amplitude (when gray light parameters were maximized) of 25%.

I was happy to see this result. Not because I believed that I had verified FTL signaling. But because I believed that I had created a paradox (the Kalamidas-Herbert paradox?) which would be resolved in some clever way that might teach us something new about the subtleties of few-photon quantum physics.

I sent my results to Demetrios, who scrutinized them with a critical eye, eventually discovering a simple conceptual error that I had missed over and over again. It's easy to overlook your own mistakes—another good reason for peer review in science.

Correcting my mistake I recalculated and obtained Bob-induced interference at Alice's detectors. But this correctly calculated interference was completely encrypted—only visible (like the Frost choice) if Bob sends a coincidence-triggered decryption signal to Alice at slower-than-light speeds.

My conclusion?

(Quoted from NKE): I wish to congratulate Demetrios Kalamidas for coming up with his imaginative new FTL scheme which gave me much pleasure and excitement to analyze. I would also like to thank him for correcting an error in my work which, up until his intervention, seemed to show confirmation of his FTL signaling claim. After his timely input, the present (presumably correct) calculation demonstrates a complete refutation of any FTL effect. However, the Kalamidas scheme of erasing which-path info by mixing Fock light with gray light is clever and may yet find new technical applications in areas other than superluminal communication technology.

Sketch of the original Kalamidas experiment (OKE)

Demetrios! the Opera

Bruce Damer auditioning for Demetrios! the Opera

DEMETRIOS! THE OPERA

Mama, Mama, Mama:
Photonic entanglement
O Mama mia:
Faster than light.

Mama, Mama, Mama:
Gray light's the Secret.
O Mama mia:
Could Einstein be right?

Will we go back in time
When his theory's been tested?
Can we mix Gray light and Fock
Without being arrested?

Has he found the white light
At the end of the trail?
Is Demetrios the knight
Who's discovered the Grail?

Changing our history
Could really be risky:
Is this how the story 
Of humankind ends?

One touch with the past
Might well be our last: 
Adios, homo sapiens. 

One touch with the past 
Might well be our last: 
Adios, homo sapiens.

TWO VALENTINES

Nick's Knot by August O'Connor

TWO VALENTINES


OM'S LAW

My best teachers
have been those
who produced the greatest amperage
with the barest minimum
of voltage.


VALENTINE 2013

You're just like every other woman:
pretending to give me
only what you think
I might be looking for.

I'm sorry, honey.
I wasn't paying attention.
Thank you
For all your complex surprises.

KISS -- a New Superluminal Communication Scheme

Demetrios A. Kalamidas

The phenomenon of quantum entanglement is truly bizarre. Two quantum particles (photons, electrons, atoms, for instance) that have once interacted seem in theory to behave as a single entity. No matter how distant their separation, an action on one seems (again only in the theory) to instantly affect the state of its distant partner -- which suggests that entangled particles can communicate faster than light. However no experiment with entangled particles has ever revealed a human-usable superluminal connection. Furthermore, using the very theory that describes entanglement, one can prove (in agreement with all current experiments) that superluminal signaling is impossible. However any impossibility proof is only as good as the assumptions that go into it. One can easily imagine that an ingenious way of making a quantum measurement might be discovered that evades the assumptions underlying these proofs, hence opening the door to a practical faster-than-light signaling scheme.

Recently Demetrios Kalamidas, who has a degree from CCNY and is currently working at New York nanotech company Raith USA, has proposed an FTL signaling scheme using a novel kind of quantum measurement. His proposal (which I have called KISS, for "Kalamidas's Instant Signaling Scheme) has been accepted for publication in the March 2013 issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America. A preprint version with essentially the same content as Kalamidas's JOSA article appears here.

The KISS proposal is based on the observation that one member A of an entangled pair AB can show interference effects when its distant partner B is measured in a manner that "destroys which-path information". These interference effects vanish when B is measured in a manner that detects which of two paths B actually took. On the face of it this looks exactly like superluminal signaling were it not for the fact that in order to see this interference, "coincidence information" about results at B must be sent (at light speed or slower) and this information is necessary to separate the superluminal signal from noise.

One way of looking at this situation is that, using entangled particles, superluminal signals can indeed be sent. But these FTL messages are encrypted in a perfectly unbreakable cipher that can only be decoded using a key sent at light speed or slower. So far all schemes to send signals FTL have failed due to the necessity of sending this decryption key by conventional means.

The KISS scheme purports to be different. Kalamidas proposes to destroy "which-path" information in a novel way (that involves mixing the photons that carry this information with a kind of light that possesses an indefinite number of photons). Kalamidas calculates, in his JOSA paper, that this clever new way of introducing ambiguity into the which-path measurement of the B photon has an immediate effect on its A partner -- an effect that is "in the clear" and does not need to be decoded.

Although it is evident that this proposal is a bare naked FTL communication scheme, Kalamidas modestly entitles his paper A Proposal for a Feasible Quantum-optical Experiment to Test the Validity of the No-Signaling Theorem.

Sketch of the KISS proposal (from JOSA article)

Ode to Bruce Eisner (1948-2013)

Bruce Eisner (1948-2013)

ODE TO BRUCE EISNER (1948-2013)

You wanna play around with nitrous. Nick?
Or do you want the real thing?
The big D?
Betsy and Heinz:
braver than me
My mother and my father
were braver than me.

Experience Big D:
Not LSD, not ketamine, not nitrous oxide
But the Real Thing.

The Real Thing:
Bruce Eisner just got it:
the Real Thing:
the Big D.

Not just fucking around
With sex: with the little death
with flesh, touch and ecstasy
with the dissolving of boundaries
between human beings.

Not just experimenting 
With drugs: with the terror, the ego dissolution
With the colors, the visions 
The mergings with others.
None of that
None of that kid stuff.
Are you brave enough
to experience the Big D?

None of that kid stuff
Sex, drugs and quantum physics--
the partial dissolvings
into the natural world.
The recreational explorations
The playful dissolutions:
wordless, scary, inexplicable.
But always coming home.

None of that kid stuff
Are you willing to experience
Big D?

Big D:
Total disengagement
from this habitual universe --
The end of the affair
The last goodbye
The final dissolution.

Are you willing and ready
to take the quantum leap?
Big D:
No more kid stuff

No more kid stuff, my friend.
This is the Real Thing.
You want Reality?
This is it.

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