Shri Nick Predicts: 2014

Shri Nick Predicts: 2014

As we approach the Longest Night of the Year, it is customary for pundits, psychics and raving lunatics to formulate predictions that might guide our actions in the coming New Year. Here direct from the Quantum Tantric Ashram in Boulder Creek are Shri Nick Herbert's hopes and insights concerning events likely to occur in the coming year. Adjust your investment portfolio accordingly.

1. Apple Computer will introduce two new upgrades of system OS X--Domestic Cat and Street Cat which will continue to steal market share from Windows.

2. As physicists unanimously recognize its deep kinship with the mystical Slavic soul, Dark Matter will henceforth be known as Ukrainium.

3. For his imaginative Schopenhaurer-inspired performance of Urge: a Short Opera About Reality, Nick Herbert will be awarded a special Oscar for "the best metamusical of 2014".



4. Scott Hulan Jones's film Supernature: Esalen and the Human Potential is released in 2014 and subsequently breaks all box office records as the Year's Most Popular Documentary.


5. Peace is achieved in the Middle East following implementation of Doctor Jabir's two-state solution. For his essential role in these negotiations, President Obama shares his second Nobel Peace Prize with Jabir abd al Khaliq.

6. The Periodic Table gains several new members--fractionally charged elements collectively known as  "Inbetweenia."

7. Alien starships fail to make an appearance. The reason? All really smart aliens travel from mind to mind. Aliens call Earth "Planet of the Hates". And who would wish telepathic contact with a world of whiners?

8. The Best Book of the Year is Michael Muhammad Knight's "Tripping With Allah", a roller-coaster ride through the illuminated mosque-mind of "the Hunter S. Thompson of Islam". Thanks, Max.

9. An accidental discovery in a remote part of the world gives us the first hint of a breakthru into the universe of quantum tantra--a brand new way of interacting with Nature more intimate than physics. Magicians, illusionists, and makers of gold from common stuff proliferate. New and exciting forms of union are experienced daily. The human world is changed forever--in a direction no one had ever guessed to exist, tho Jabir's Epistle to the Greeks caught a tiny corner of it.


10. Sales of "Harlot Nature" soar as people seek to understand and participate in the Grand Opening Night of the human species.

He Did Not Die

HE DID NOT DIE

(For Jack--If you love Hitler 
so much, Nick, 
then why don't you write a poem 
about him?--Sarfatti.)

"Who is closer to you, Sir"
                        a monk asked Buddha,
"He who loves you, or he who hates you?"
"He who hates me," replied the Buddha.
"Because he thinks of me more often."

Mighty King Lucifer
Who was brought low
Who died by his own hand
In a Berlin bunker
Who rose again.

By the power of hate
Is Our Satan kept alive
His deeds in state museums immortalized.
In our hearts we hold Him closer
Than any Christian holds his Lord.

By the power of our hatred
We made places on Earth
Where Satan's so sacred
No man dares display His Mark
Except in secret.

So long as there remains
Just one of us who hates him
He will live on.
His soul is immortal.
Der Führer did not die.

Joy of Jazz

Joy Rush singing at Scopazzi's

Shortly after the California Gold Rush, Boulder Creek was born as home for gangs of lumberjacks cutting and milling redwood trees to build houses in boom-town San Francisco. Now the loggers are mostly gone, having been displaced by wine-makers, commuters to Silicon Valley and mad geniuses in the hills, but the redwoods still remain, and chain saws are still as common in Boulder Creek as computers. Some of the early settlers were Italian: people with names like Locatelli, Robustelli and Scopazzi. And Italians love to eat.

Boulder Creek's finest restaurant is Scopazzi's, located a few blocks west of Johnnie's Market. And Scopazzi's has recently been hosting a remarkable music group called Joy of Jazz -- named after its leader and singer, the amazing Joy Rush.

Joy Rush (yes, that's her real name) not only sings, but had previously established a reputation in town as a dancer,  teaching her own brand of low-impact dance exercise called Joyrush Fitness Systems. Joy's dance training really shows: when Joy sings, every part of her body moves, not just her lips. Before putting together Joy of Jazz, Joy sang with various other local groups, as in this TV clip of Joy singing and swaying with the Jazzamanders. As its name suggests, Joy's group performs jazz standards and she is sometimes joined on stage by local singers Bonnie Bell and Vicki Coffis.

In addition to their swaying songstress, Joy of Jazz consists of Jack Bowers on piano, George Galt on harmonica, David Nordgren on upright bass, with regular guest appearances by Paul Einzinger on saxophone. Here's a video clip of Joy's back-up crew.

Jack Bowers on keyboard

In the early '70s, Jack Bowers made his fame in the San Lorenzo Valley as pianist and song writer for the Valley's notorious hippy band Oganookie, which regularly played at the Town & Country in Ben Lomond-- now a big rambling antique shop but "in the day" the T&C was our local version of San Francisco's Fillmore dance hall, complete with light shows, crazy costumes and outrageous behavior. "We performed over a thousand gigs from Petaluma to San Diego," Jack says, "and recorded an album." Jack also played piano with the Golden State Gamblers and with Jill Croston, a local girl who made good in Nashville as Lacey J Dalton. Jack's longest lasting gig was at Soledad Prison where he managed the Arts in Corrections program for more than 25 years. When First Unto This Country is a good example of Jack's work as performer and arranger.

George Galt on harmonica

George Galt is one of Boulder Creek's behind-the-scenes community leaders. As an elected member of the Parks and Recs Department, he plans the details of our annual Fourth of July Parades -- one of the 2 1/2 holidays we celebrate in Boulder Creek, the others being Hallowe'en and -- sometimes -- April Fools Day. George handles the musical aspects of these events and is currently at the center of a project to establish a radio station in BC. George is also on the board of Vajrapani, our local Buddhist center, and has even recorded a few original Buddhist songs including the show-stopping Don't Know Much About Emptiness. George has played and sung with many music groups including running harmonica riffs for Jazzamanders, Fairport Convention and the psychedelic band Ant Trip Ceremony. George repairs cars in his (fixed and mobile) garage in Boulder Creek where he recently replaced the back brakes on my Subaru -- affording a rare opportunity for a tantric quantum mechanic to share vibes with a Buddhist auto mechanic.

David Nordgren on stand-up bass

David Nordgren has been playing stand-up bass for numerous jazz groups and theater performances in the Santa Cruz area for more than a decade. He's a regular participant in the weekly jazz jams at Santa Cruz's Bocci's Cellar. David both bows and strums his instrument according to the mood of the song and in this short clip (with Bowers and Enzinger) shows off a style both solid and witty.

Paul Einzinger on saxophone

Paul Einzinger is a saxophone player now living in Felton who, like Dave Nordgren, also jams at Bocci's Cellar. To me Paul's performances seem so smooth and effortless that I was not surprised to hear from him that he had gained a lot of experience by playing in big bands. "Where did you play?" I asked, guessing maybe San Francisco, Chicago or New York. "Oh, in Idaho." Paul replied.

Here's a video clip of Joy of Jazz performing "Young at Heart" on Scopazzi's outside deck.

Nick Herbert is one of this band's biggest fans: I love Joy of Jazz. This group is so...so...QUANTUM! Whether at Scopazzi's or at one of their other musical venues, don't pass up the chance to experience Joy of Jazz. As Joy Rush likes to proclaim: "It's more fun if YOU are there."

Local God

Local God

There stands a man in Round Rock
Can grasp the rattlers behind the head
And snap them like a whip
Cracking their coiling bodies.

He is the God of these hissing snakes;
Milks the venom out of their mouths
And wraps them round his arms like bracelets.

He is our chief scientist: savage and delicate.

--William Burford (1927 -- 2004)

My Dinner with John and Mary Bell

Dinner Party chez Pierre and Mary Noyes: March 1988

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanger for the Cloak of Night

Location of the Coathanger asterism-- from APOD

HANGER FOR THE CLOAK OF NIGHT

All praise to Allah the Maker
of the Sky, the Desert and Sea.
For tonight in the Fox
with seven/fifty binocs
I first saw the Cluster
of abd al-Rahman al-Sufi.

Ibn al-Haltham -- contemporary of abd al-Rahman al-Sufi

The Coathanger Club

The al-Sufi Cluster resembles a clothes hanger

During these warm summer nights Nick has been sleeping out doors in his tree house and taking this opportunity to get acquainted with the night sky. Surrounded by redwood trees I am limited to observing one slice of the Southern sky: every two hours another sign of the Zodiac appears, beginning (in early September at latitude 35 degrees North) with Sagittarius at 9 PM, Capricorn at 11 PM and Aquarius at 1 AM. But in addition to spotting prominent landmarks such as the signs of the Zodiac I am learning a lot (from both books and observation) about arcane features of the night sky that are known and appreciated by only a few deep sky fanatics.

For instance, in the year 964, the Persian astronomer Abd al Rahman al-Sufi (known as al-Sufi) published a new map of the heavens that improved on the classic Ptolemaic picture. Al-Sufi was the first to record galaxies outside the Milky Way--the Large Magellanic Cloud (visible from Yemen) and the Andromeda Galaxy which is the most distant object (2 million light years) visible to the naked eye.

He also recorded a tiny asterism known today as al-Sufi's cluster or Brocchi's cluster (after an amateur astronomer who studied it 1000 years later than al-Sufi). It is also called the Coat Hanger--well--because it looks like a coat hanger.

Get out your binoculars for a small but memorable non-drug experience under the night sky.

From the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day site, here's a picture of the Coathanger.

Which of you will be the first to spot the "Coathanger Asterism"?  initially discovered 1000 years ago by a Muslim astronomer living in Isfahan in what is now called Iran?

The easiest way to spot the al-Sufi Cluster is to locate the Summer Triangle, which is almost directly overhead in the early fall and consists of the three bright stars Vega, Deneb and Altair (all named, like so many other stars in the sky, by words derived from Arabic). The Coathanger lies about 1/3 of the way along a straight line from Altair to Vega, appearing as a bright patch in the Milky Way. Binoculars will be needed to resolve its coathangerish nature.

The al-Sufi Cluster lies in the minor constellation Vulpecula (Latin for Little Fox).

The world is divided into two categories of people, those few who have seen the Coathanger (al-Sufi's Cluster) with their own eyes (pictures don't count) and the majority who will never experience this little star thrill.

Members of the elite Coathanger Club are rumored to greet one another by exchanging the esoteric gesture that identifies a Viewer of the al-Sufi Cluster--a closed fist placed above the back of an out-stretched palm.

Nick has not yet joined the secret society of Coathangers. It's cloudy right now in Boulder Creek. But on the next clear night he intends to leave the rabble behind and to become a member of the society of "Those Who Have Seen the al-Sufi Asterism."

Will you join me in the Coathanger Club? Or will you choose to remain an Outsider?

Letter to St. Charles

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

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

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


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

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

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

Nick Herbert, St Charles Borromeo, Class of 1954

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".