Nick Herbert's new 'Metaphase Typewriter' idea

Nick Herbert 

Nick Herbert -- hippie physicist, friend of RAW, Quantum Reality author, fringe science editor for Mondo 2000 -- has a wild new blog post up, "Metaphase Typewriter 2.0: a Preposterous Proposition." It's about his efforts to build a device to communicate with "a few recently deceased friends" and other entities in the beyond. 

You should read the whole thing -- it will probably be the most interesting article you read all day -- but let me offer a taste. Here are the opening sentences:

"In the early 1970s I designed and built the Metaphase Typewriter, a machine intended to communicate with spirits, based on the assumption that somehow consciousness, human or otherwise, arises at the quantum level and that an open quantum channel producing human speech or text might be able to be “possessed by some discarnate entity" in a manner similar to the way trance mediums can be taken over by alternate personalities. The Metaphase Typewriter was inspired.by Jane Roberts's Seth books. "

Herbert recounts his efforts to get the machine to work, discusses his efforts to improve the idea and his new inspiration for  how to get one that might work, concluding:

"Nick's preposterous proposition is the conjecture that today's quantum computers are not really computers at all (sure, they can--noisily--compute) but these systems may actually be better suited to operate as easy gateways to new kinds of quantum soul to soul connections, connections that are difficult today for us to even imagine, so deeply hypnotized are all of us by the materialism-is-everything trance. The interfacing will certainly be a bitch, but your children will appreciate the essential part you played in transforming their humdrum lives into complex experiences beyond present human recognition."

Nick Herbert in the 'New Yorker'

A recent photo of Nick Herbert, posted at his blog. 

The New Yorker runs a piece on "The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer," by Stephen Witt, and my favorite "hippie physicist," Nick Herbert, pops up in the narrative:

"But Clauser had also demonstrated that entangled particles were more than just a thought experiment. They were real, and they were even stranger than Einstein had thought. Their weirdness attracted the attention of the physicist Nick Herbert, a Stanford Ph.D. and LSD enthusiast whose research interests included mental telepathy and communication with the afterlife. Clauser showed Herbert his experiment, and Herbert proposed a machine that would use entanglement to communicate faster than the speed of light, enabling the user to send messages backward through time. Herbert’s blueprint for a time machine was ultimately deemed unfeasible, but it forced physicists to start taking entanglement seriously. 'Herbert’s erroneous paper was a spark that generated immense progress,' the physicist Asher Peres recalled, in 2003."

See this blog post, if "Clauser" does not ring a bell. Here is Nick's blog. 

Hat tip, Joseph Matheny. I guess I should make the RAW connection explicit: Nick Herbert is mentioned in the first Cosmic Trigger book. 

'Hippie physicist' Nick Herbert on John Stewart Bell and the Nobel Prize

Nick Herbert attended a dinner party in 1988 in California that allowed him to meet physicist John Stewart Bell and Bell's wife, Mary Ross Bell. 

The recent Nobel Prize in physics given to three physicists who helped prove Bell's theorem, which I wrote about in a recent blog post,  has inspired a new blog post from my favorite "hippie physicist," Nick Herbert (as in How the Hippies Saved Physics, the David Kaiser book about the physicists Robert Anton Wilson wrote about in Cosmic Trigger and elsewhere.)

In his post, "The Reality Prize," Herbert provides background on the new Nobel Prize from his own perspective; one of the three winners, John Clauser, had lectured at Esalen (like Herbert) and Herbert apparently knew him quite well.

Herbert's explanation of Bell's theorem and his essay has some mind-blowing paragraphs. After describing what happens with a pair of entangled photons, one observed by "Alice" and one by "Bob," Herbert writes:

So what more does this magnificently useful but utterly mysterious wavefunction say about the Alice and Bob experiment?

First: Quantum theory says that whatever happens is entirely independent of the distance between Alice and Bob. If they are in the same room, as in most practical physics experiments, the results will be exactly the same as if they were ten thousand light years apart, separated by vast interstellar distances.

Second: While unobserved, the wavefunction does not assign any polarization attribute to either Alice's or Bob's photon, but when Alice measures her photon, using a clock direction of her choice, her photon instantly acquires a definite value, AND SO DOES BOB'S PHOTON even though Alice and Bob might be separated by galactic distance. This instantaneous connection, if it is real and not just confined to the theory, violates all the norms of modern physics.

Alice's apparently instant action on Bob's photon has gotta be faster than light (goodbye Einstein) but that's only part of the trouble. This interaction, unlike any we are familiar with in physics, is not diminished by distance. Furthermore, this Alice-Bob intimacy is not transmitted by any field we know of-- it just happens. Alice's action on Bob's photon is, in brief, unmitigated, unmediated and immediate.

Physicists label such alleged behavior, as “non-local”, a tame word that conceals their deep intellectual loathing for an unholy abomination, for a deeply unnatural act.

Reading the whole thing is a worthwhile use of your time. Herbert is the author of Quantum Reality, a popular science book that discusses quantum theory. 

Herbert corresponded with John Stewart Bell and actually met Bell in 1988 at a dinner party: "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."

Cosmic Trigger Reading Group, Week 29, featuring Saul-Paul Sirag

Welcome to week 28 of the Cosmic Trigger Reading Group. This week we are working with the afterwords by Saul Paul Sirag (247 Hilaritas), and we are lucky enough to have a guest post by Saul-Paul himself. I found this post to be informative, heartwarming, and full of the spirit of Robert Anton Wilson. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. — Charles Faris

Saul-Paul Sirag in 2007 (Facebook photo) 

Cosmic Trigger After 39 Years 

By Saul-Paul Sirag (30 Sept. 2016)

In 1977 Robert Anton Wilson asked me to write an “Afterward” to Cosmic Trigger, which was his wildly ranging personal Odyssey.

Those who have been deeply moved by RAW and his astounding biography, may be interested in an update to my “Afterward.”

I wrote about the things that I had discussed with Bob and Arlen and the off-beat folks I met at his home. This included especially: Uri Geller, Extraterrestrials, Quantum Theory, and Arthur Eddington’s approach to physics.

Since 1973 I had been living at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness and working as research assistant to Arthur Young, the founder of this institute (and the preceding Journal for the Study of Consciousness). This institute was only a few blocks from where Bob was living on College Avenue in the Elmwood district of Berkeley. So I visited Bob frequently and took Nick Herbert and other friends to meet him.

By 1977, Bob was living up in the Berkeley hills, so I had to take a bus to visit him, but I continued to go there as often as I could. There were, of course, other complementary activities to occupy my attention: The Fundamental Physics Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Physics Consciousness Research Group in San Francisco. You can read about these activities in David Kaiser’s book How the Hippies Saved Physics (2011, Norton).

Bob also participated in some of the PCRG activities. He usually presented his inimitable take on Timothy Leary’s SMI2LE program (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase and Life Extension).

I didn’t have a television, but I enjoyed watching TV with Bob. He was constantly switching channels between say, Star Trek and some old movie like King Kong. Or between All in the Family and D.W. Griffiths’ Intolerance. He always found that they had thematic correspondences. For example the problem of communicating with alien intelligence as in Star Trek and King Kong.

Bob was fascinated by my stories about Uri Geller and Andrija Puharich both of whom I had met in 1973, in Berkeley and on their home turf of New York (See Uri by Puharich, 1974). Their tales of ET contact resonated with some of Bob’s experiences, and those of Timothy Leary and John Lilly.

The account I wrote in the “Afterward” is the closest I have come to some semblance of the ET reality. See also my “Notes on Contact” published in Jack Sarfatti’s Destiny Matrix (2002).

As Jacques Vallee has emphasized, there is a large psychic component to the ET experience. Certainly this is true of the Uri/Puharich experiences. Also, in accord with Vallee’s ideas, I believe that the ET contact is not from a long distance away but from a hyper-dimensional realm.

The reality of physical hyperspace (10d, 11d, 12d, and 26d, all interrelated) is a necessary aspect of present-day string theory. See my recently published book, ADEX Theory: How the ADE Coxeter Graphs Unify Mathemetics and Physics (World Scientific, 2016). For a review by Nick Herbert, see:

http://quantumtantra.blogspot.com/2016/07/saul-paul-sirags-new-math-book.html

Nick Herbert. Photo from his blog, Quantum Tantra. 

Quantum mechanics was a big part of discussions with Bob, especially when Nick Herbert was present. His book Quantum Reality (1985) is still in print and is one of the best descriptions of the kinds of things we discussed with Bob back in the mid-to-late 70s, when John Clauser’s experiments at Berkeley were still fresh. Clauser was a key member of the Fundamental Physics Group, so we interacted with him frequently.

My own take on Quantum theory and the human mind is best expressed in my Appendix paper in Jeffrey Mishlove’s book, The Roots of Consciousness, 2nd Ed. (Hawthorne, 1993). This Appendix article is titled: “Consciousness: a Hyperspace View.”

There I explained the Von Neumann/Wigner interpretation of Quantum mechanics, which is an elaboration of the standard Copenhagen interpretation. This makes the Observer indispensible to the structure and application of QM.

This interlock between the observer and the observed was also a central theme of Arthur Eddington’s take on Quantum theory, as expressed in the two quotes from Eddington in my Cosmic Trigger “Afterward.”

In my ADEX Theory book I also quote from Eddington’s Philosophy of Physical Science, (1939) p. 150:

“The recognition that physical knowledge is structural knowledge abolishes all dualism of consciousness and matter. Dualism depends on the belief that we find in the external world something of a nature incommensurable with what we find in consciousness; but all that physical science reveals to us in the external world is group-structure, and group- structure is also to be found in consciousness. When we take a structure of sensations in a particular consciousness and describe it in physical terms as part of the structure of an external world, it is still a structure of sensations. It would be entirely pointless to invent something else for it to be a structure of.”

I have been studying Eddington’s works since high school, when my younger brother, David, and I and a close friend had a kind of club studying Relativity Theory by way of Einstein’s writings and especially Eddington’s Space, Time, and Gravitation (1920).

Then starting in 1973, when I began working with Arthur Young at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, I read all of Eddington’s books. Arthur was a great fan of Eddington and his group theory approach to physics. Eddington’s approach was denigrated by physicists who wanted to eliminate the “group pest” from physics. Since then, of course, group theory in physics has become central to our understanding of many aspects of physics, especially the all-important study of particles and forces. String theory has only magnified the role of group theory. So Eddington was on the right track, but too far ahead of his time.

Incidentally, my Eddington influenced paper “A combinatorial derivation of the proton-electron mass ratio” was published in Nature Vol. 268 (28 July 1977).

Note that the reference in my “Afterward” is not correct, and I had not been able to get it corrected in subsequent printings of Cosmic Trigger.

Sir Arthur Eddington 

Much of what Eddington conjectured has turned out to be wrong. For example in The Philosophy of Physical Science (p. 112), Eddington disparaged the existence of neutrinos. These particles had been conjectured by Wolfgang Pauli and named by Enrico Fermi in 1932. So Eddington, writing in 1939, was decrying the plethora of papers building on this conjecture. However, the physics community by 1939 had made neutrinos an important ingredient of the weak-force theory of the radio-active decay of chemical elements.

Because neutrinos have no electric charge and practically no mass, they are very hard to detect. It wasn’t until 1956 that neutrinos were detected in a convincing experiment. So the long wait from 1932 to 1956, left room for doubts such as those of Eddington, who died in 1944 and did not live to see the neutrino idea confirmed.

However, Eddington’s emphasis on group theory as fundamental to the understanding of the physical world has turned out to be prescient, even if the particular groups that Eddington favored were not able to point the way forward.

Coda

The following piece is what I wrote to be read by Nick Herbert at Robert Anton Wilson’s Memorial in 2007. Nick was not able to fit my piece into the very packed schedule at Bob’s memorial. So I am appending it here as my tribute to RAW and his fascination with 23 and 17.

In Memory of Robert Anton Wilson (1932 – 2007)

As we all know Robert Anton Wilson gleefully observed synchronicities — especially those involving the number 23. I remember Bob telling me that Alan Watts turned him on to the importance of both 17 and 23 throughout history; and thus these numbers thread through Bob's Cosmic Trigger autobiography.

I happen to favor the number 137, since the inverse of this number very closely approximates the probability that any two electrons will exchange a photon at any time. In other words, if you could interview all the electrons in some room (or even in a tiny portion of that room) and ask:

“Are you electrons at this instant either emitting or absorbing a photon?”

One out of 137 electrons would say "Yes." This number, therefore, describes the strength of the electromagnetic force. As Richard Feynman has said, "Every good theoretical physicist puts this number up on his wall and worries about it."

When I met Bob in 1976 and learned about his fascination with 17 and 23, I wondered if 137 could be fit into the grand conspiracy of these numbers. After all so much of physical reality depends on the electromagnetic force and therefore on 137.

In 1980, while I was talking with Bob on one of my many visits to his home in the Berkeley hills, I mentioned the hot new mathematical scheme called public key cryptography. These schemes depend on a trap-door feature described as easy-to-fall-in but hard-to-climb-out. Thus we have a scheme for easy encoding, and nearly impossible decoding without the secret numbers. John James, a computer programmer who was present, immediately showed me an article in ROM magazine that spelled out the algorithm for a version of public key cryptography called RSA. It depends on the extreme difficulty of finding the prime factors of large numbers. Any message can be considered as a number, as for instance this entire sentence codes as a binary number in any computer. OK, take that number, call it M (for message) and multiply it by itself x times. Call x the encoding power. Now take the huge number, M to the x power, and divide it by the product of two prime numbers, p times q. (For secure trap-door coding, these prime numbers p and q would have around 100 decimal digits each.) Throw away everything but the remainder in this division of M to the x power by p times q. Label this remainder C, and call it the encoded message.

How can we decode this message? We will need a secret decoding number called y, which we can apply to C by multiplying C by itself y times. Then we can recover the message M by dividing C to the y power by p times q, and again keeping only the remainder. This remainder is guaranteed to be the original message M — provided that we have created a certain (very important) relationship between x and y. It must be set up that x times y leaves the remainder 1, when we divide x times y by (p minus 1) times (q minus 1). We must keep p and q secret also, so that the secret decoding power y could not be calculated. The encoding power x and the product of p and q should be made public in this Public-Key Cryptography scheme.

Got that? OK don't worry, I'll show you an example — actually the very first example I tried on my pocket calculator. With no concern for security, but merely wanting to see this magic trap-door scheme in action, I used Bob's 17 and 23 as my two prime numbers p and q — you knew they were going to pop up about here in my story! Then I set up my favorite number 137 as the only message I wanted to send on this very first test. I had to choose an encoding number, so I chose 5 (for the Discordian Law of 5). Actually, as it turned out, I could have chosen any odd number and gotten the same startling encoded message. So take 137 and multiply it by itself 5 times, and divide by 17 times 23. Throw away the answer except the remainder. The remainder — big surprise! — comes out as 137.

So the message 137 codes as itself — transparent to the trap-door coding scheme of the secret prime numbers 17 and 23.

I showed this wonderful synchronicity of numbers to Bob, and he just roared his gleeful laugh.

I have to think that Bob in his last year of life had many gleeful chuckles over the discord among astronomers in naming the 10th planet —first named Xena by its discoverer in 2005, but later designated a dwarf planet in 2006 and named – of all possible names – Eris!

Farewell, Bob – to Eris – and beyond!

Okay, that’s (almost) a wrap! One quick note regarding Saul-Paul’s post—the good folks at Hilaritas have now (39 years later!) corrected the reference to Saul-Paul’s Eddington influenced paper in all future editions of Cosmic Trigger. As always, comments are welcome and actually necessary to bring in the additional dimensions necessary to make this group reading of Cosmic Trigger string theory compliant. Next week, the full-on wrap-up. No reading necessary, although a quick review of the text of CT, these 28 blog posts and the commentary couldn’t hurt! — Charles Faris

Cosmic Trigger online reading group, Week 23!

Charter members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, Fred Wolf

By Charles Faris, Cosmic Trigger reading group guest blogger

Welcome to lucky week 23 of the RAWIllumination Cosmic Trigger Reading Group. This week we take a look at ERP and Bell’s Theorem (193) and “see what modern physics has to offer.”

Esalen Institute co-founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price

Of course, what Bob called “modern physics” in the mid 1970’s is not what we would call modern physics today. And of course, like Bob, I am not a physicist. The Author’s primary sources for information on the relationship between physics and consciousness were members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, which included Jack Sarfatti, Nick Herbert, Fred Wolfe, Fritjof Capra, and Saul-Paul Sirag. Many of the members of this group also made up the Physics-Consciousness Research Group, which was founded by Sarfatti and Michael Murphy (of the Esalen Institute) and funded in part by Werner Erhard of EST fame.

Fritjof Capra

Werner Erhard

At the time that Bob was writing Cosmic Trigger the PCRG approach was white hot, and best-sellers such as Space-Time and Beyond (1975—Fred Wolfe), The Tao of Physics (1975—Capra), and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters (Gary Zukav—1979) were high in the public consciousness. The Zukav book in particular, partially ghost written by Sarfatti, Bob’s primary source for New Physics in CT, was a big hit and set the tone for the popularization of anything that mixes Quantum Mechanics and Eastern Mysticism into a frothy stew. Today we have Deepak Chopra, Amit Goswami, and Michio Kaku, all of whom are prone to much more Pronouncement and much less Model Agnosticism than Bob, which could explain a bit about his life-long financial struggles (but I digress).

Gary Zukav

Deepak Chopra

Amit Goswami

Michio Kaku

Of course there was also a lot of push-back from The Skeptics, led by The Amazing Randi and his famous million dollar prize, which has yet to be collected, although this is hardly surprising given that PSI, ESP, and Telepathy etc. seem to operate more in a Quantum Chaos throw the dice manner, whereas Randi wants proof that looks more Newtonian Classical, like “put that damned particle through the left slot EVERY TIME, dammit.” Again, not much Model Agnosticism going on.

The Amazing Randi

Since The Author wrote Cosmic Trigger a lot has changed as far as interpretations of Quantum Mechanics go, and there are now at least 13 competing (and perhaps commingling) interpretations currently.

Since he was apparently Bob’s primary source in the writing of Cosmic Trigger, I contacted Jack Sarfatti and asked him to bring us up to date on the information presented in this chapter. Bearing in mind that the following is Jack’s particular reality tunnel, it may perhaps be best to utilize this chapter as a historical view—if anyone has a well-written contemporary piece of similar intent and agnostic attitude, please let us know!

Herewith is my email interview of Sarfatti regarding the info in ERP and Bell’s Theorem:

CF: ERP “proves” that if Quantum Mechanics is “true” this requires instantaneous contact between some particles, even if at opposite ends of Universe.

JS: Not accurate. Back when it was written it was plausible, but no longer.
Quantum entanglement is very fragile, and for particles out in space, the initial entanglement will almost certainly be destroyed by collisions with other particles.
Even if it was not, it is of very little consequence since actual message using entanglement alone is not possible in quantum mechanics.

CF: BELL’s theorizes 3 possible interpretations of the ERP effect—QM fails, OBJECTIVITY fails, LOCALITY fails.

JS: Not accurate. Back when it was written it was plausible, but no longer.

We now know through the work of Yakir Aharonov, Huw Price, Ken Wharton, and Rod Sutherland, that the only way to correctly understand quantum theory is through OBJECTIVE LOCALLY REAL RETROCAUSALITY in which future "destiny" causes post-determine what happens in the present in addition to the common sense past "history" causes. OBJECTIVE LOCAL RETROCAUSALITY is the only way to understand quantum entanglement without violating Einstein's special and general theories of relativity.
FASTER-THAN-LIGHT NONLOCALITY never happens directly. It is a mirage, the effect of OBJECTIVE LOCAL RETROCAUSALITY as probably first explained in the 1950s by O. Costa de Beauregard as the "zig-zag" also used by John Cramer in his "transactional interpretation." Indeed, so long as the entanglement is not destroyed by environmental decoherence, the statistical correlations do not depend on the space-time separation between the localized strong measurements on each particle in the entangled network.

Quantum uncertainty (e.g. Heisenberg) in the present is only because we must integrate over all possible future destiny causes. Therefore, our quantum theory using only past causes is incomplete as Einstein correctly thought. When one includes future destiny causes "God does not play dice with the universe." However, because quantum theory does not allow stand-alone quantum entanglement messaging, the usual Heisenberg uncertainties apply as a pragmatically useful effective description for simple scattering experiments on dead matter. This situation changes for those degrees of freedom responsible for life and consciousness in open complex systems with long-range quantum coherence (as first discussed by Herbert Frohlich). The situation changes for living matter, which is a POST-QUANTUM THEORY effect.

CF: If QM fails, then we have a Whole New Ball Game—I assume we are not at this juncture.

JS: Yes, we are. QM fails for living matter. We now have a Bohmian Pilot-Wave/Beable Post-Quantum-Theory PQM that explains living matter. It solves the "hard problem" of David Chalmers i.e. how our conscious "qualia" fit in with laws of physics and it opens up the door for new kinds of super-technology.

CF: If Objectivity fails we might have an Observer-Created World, which would allow for Psychokinesis, and/or Many World’s Model, which allows for Time Travel without paradox.

JS: No, the "observer-created world" is largely a fantasy. It's the same as believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. One does not need to sacrifice objectivity to allow for psychokinesis, and time travel to the past without paradox. That is a wrong idea that was plausible in the 1970s when Bob wrote Cosmic Trigger, but no longer.

CF: If Locality fails we have Superluminal Information Transfer, which allows for ESP and Extra-Terrestrial Communication, and/or Synchronistic Acausal Connections, which is like a Jungian World.

JS: No, again this is muddled. There is never Superluminal Information Transfer SIT - that is Fool's Gold that we all bought for a long time. What we have is PQM OBJECTIVELY LOCALLY REAL RETROCAUSAL ENTANGLEMENT MESSAGING THAT ZIG-ZAGS IN SPACETIME AND WHICH IS MISTAKEN FOR SIT. It's AS IF there is SIT, but in fact it is BACK FROM THE FUTURE PQM messaging.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.00039.pdf

above is picture of the objective locally real but back-from-the-future retrocausal zig-zag that explains the MIRAGE the Fool's Gold of FTL spooky action

it's really BACK FROM THE FUTURE SPOOKY ACTION - that does not violate Einstein's relativity.

Bottom line—everything R A Wilson wrote over 40 years ago was how we thought back then, but no longer.
We have advanced significantly since then.

Other useful links are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0AipdgHRtI

https://vimeo.com/171013596

https://vimeo.com/171178181

If you would like to see how Jack writes when he is not trying to be simple, this is worth a look: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/progress-post-quantum-theory-consciousness-augut-27-2016-sarfatti?articleId=7008179474198465064

If this subject is of particular interest to you I recommend How the Hippies Saved Physics, which is mentioned quite a few times right in this blog. Nick Herbert’s Quantum Tantra blog is also a good place to explore if you are interested in a contemporary gloss on this sort of thing, and his book Quantum Reality is still a good look at Quantum Mechanics from the more psychedelic POV, even if it is 30 years old. Jack Sarfatti is active on Facebook and has an active blog as well. [You can also follow @JackSarfatti on Twitter — The Management.]

Okay — that’s about it as far as the physics goes. If anyone has any interesting insights into this intellectually challenging area please share them with the group. Next week we change tack and look at the Leary 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness with Tunnel-Realities and Imprints (201).

'Hippie physicists' at it again

Nick Herbert and Jack Sarfatti, two of the hippie physicists described in David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics and Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 1,  still believe that sending signals faster than light may be possible. (Kaiser's book describes how they pursued it and laid the groundwork for quantum cryptography instead.)

The latest proposal for FTL signaling comes from Demetrios Kalamidas, described by Herbert as a physicist who "who has a degree from CCNY and is currently working at New York nanotech company Raith USA."

Herbert explains the proposal here. Sarfatti discusses it here and here.

Sarfatti writes, "This may be a historic event of the first magnitude if the Fat Lady really sings this time and shatters the crystal goblet. On the Dark Side this may open Pandora's Box into a P.K. Dick Robert Anton Wilson reality with controllable delayed choice precognition technology. ;-)"

And he writes, "This technology, if it were to work is as momentous as the discovery of fire, the wheel, movable type, calculus, the steam engine, electricity, relativity, nuclear fission & fusion, Turing machine & Von Neumann's programmable computer concept, DNA, transistor, internet ..."

A big if, but it's interesting that they are excited. I don't pretend to understand the physics.

Nick Herbert's telepathic contact with the aliens

Everyone who enjoyed Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati should read "hippie physicist" Nick  Herbert's account of the time he believed he had been contacted by aliens who telepathed their thoughts into his brain. (They invited him into their cosmic conspiracy. He turned them down out of loyalty to the human race!)

Here is a good sentence from Dr. Herbert's blog post: "For me legal LSD and peyote acted as gateway drugs to the illegal use of marijuana."

New movie coming about Esalen

One of my favorite "hippie physicists," Nick Herbert, reports on this blog that a new documentary on Esalen is in the works. (I don't know if Robert Anton Wilson ever taught there, but I know he spent time in a hot tub there.) Herbert links to the trailer, which features Herbert and other names that RAW fans may find familiar.

Robert Anton Wilson article from Oui magazine

How the Hippies Changed Physics by David Kaiser is a new book about the oddball physicists that Robert Anton Wilson discusses in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati — people such as Jack Sarfatti, Nick Herbert, and so on.

In the notes, Kaiser references an article by Robert Anton Wilson from Oui magazine, published in 1979, which discusses quantum mechanics and many of the topics which the "hippie physicists" obsessed over. In fact, if you read Wilson's article first, you can read the Kaiser book as a "sequel" to many of the topics Wilson raises. (For example, Sarfatti and then Herbert both used Bell's theorem to try to invent a way to achieve faster than light communication. Both ideas were not viable, but according to Kaiser, Herbert's idea was so clever, it helped give birth to quantum cryptography.)

Anyway, I have now obtained a PDF of that Wilson article, which is a valuable explanation of certain concepts of quantum mechanics and has much other useful material. (It's surprising that it's never been reprinted, to my knowledge.) You can read it here (right click to download, then read it in any PDF viewer. Google "PDF viewer" in the unlikely event your computer doesn't already have one.) I also have posted it under "Feature Articles and Interviews." I gratefully acknowledge the help of Michael Johnson, who supplied the article from his copious RAW files.

Excerpt from 'How the Hippies Saved Physics'

The Institute of Noetic Sciences has published an excerpt from How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser. That's the book I've blogged about here, which is all about the offbeat physicists, such as Nick Herbert and Jack Sarfatti, who Robert Anton Wilson wrote about it Cosmic Trigger 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. The excerpt should give you a pretty idea of what the book is like. (Via Jack Sarfatti on Twitter.)

How the Hippies Saved Physics

I've begun reading How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser, which as I wrote earlier, is all about the physicists RAW wrote about in Cosmic Trigger 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (and many other places.)

Two of Robert Anton Wilson's writings are cited in the bibliography: Cosmic Trigger 1 and "The Science of the Impossible," an article that appeared in the March 1979 issue of Oui magazine. The article is not posted at rawilsonfans.com, so it's one more article for someone to track down. (I'd reprint it here if someone could send me a clip.)

In addition, the text quotes from an article Robert Anton Wilson wrote for an underground newspaper in the Bay Area in 1976. No exact citation is given. The notes explain that the clipping was provided by Saul-Paul Sirag, who believes that it originally appeared in a local underground newspaper.

Michael Johnson annotates the new book

[If you missed it, Michael Johnson posted a long comment to Sunday's blog post about How the Hippies Saved Physics, which is literally all about the offbeat physicists in the Bay Area who greatly influenced RAW's thinking. Michael's comment is a useful annotation to the must-read book of the summer, so I am reposting it here everyone will see it -- Tom]

The Physics-Consciousness Research Group. See:

Illuminati Papers: 32 (diagram of "context-dependent language model of Nick Herbert); 56 ( Sarfatti on ETI contactees); pp.94-103

Leary's Info-Psychology: 33 (and 8th circuit); 49 (note Sarfatti in context); 129-131 (written by Nick Herbert)

Cosmic Trigger 2: 257 (Back To The Future best artistic expression of quantum logic: Sarfatti model fro Chris Lloyd); 267-268

Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy: 242 & 314, 426-427 (Herbert's QUIP); 274 (Capra's Tao of Physics); 343-344 (Sarfatti); 345-346 (Sirag's General Field Theory); 540-545

Trajectories May 1982 and Fall 1984: Nick Herbert and Bell's Theorem

Gnosis, Winter 1988-89:(Sarfatti and Faster-Than-Light ideas FTL); Edwin Harris Walker

Coincidance: 153-155 (Walker, Honegger, Sarfatti)

Semiotext(E) SF: 70-72 (Nick Herbert's wild particle physics story that includes RU Sirius)

Omni, Dec, 1979, "UFO Update" (Sirag's conjecture about time travellers)

Prometheus Rising: acknowledgment page: Sirag, Sarfatti, Herbert, who "clarified (RAW's) whole comprehension of epistemology;" 41 (and 8CB model); 183 (Barbara Honegger: cave paintings & 5th circuit yogic/shamanic brain: 30K yrs ago); 204 (Honegger's theory of synchroncity); 267-269 (Bell's Theorem and Sarfatti, et.al)

Mavericks of the Mind: 67-88 (Nick Herbert); 124 (Honegger); 125 (Walker)

Chaos and Beyond: 232-235 (review of Fred Alan Wolf's Eagle's Quest)

Everything Is Under Control: 138 (Sarfatti)

New Libertarian magazine Interview, 4/10-77: two pages on magick and quantum mechanics. Sarfatti as the head of the PCRG. RAW recommends Space-Time and Beyond, by Bob Toben, but Sarfatti says the ideas are his?

for another view of Sarfatti, see him as a North Beach denizen (San Francisco) in Herbert Gold's book on Behemia

Email To The Universe: 41 (Capra and Herbert); 244 (group mentioned); 223 (Mishlove might have been PCRG)

Michael Hollingshead interview (High Times?): RAW says he's the PCRG's "chief literary spokesman;" RAW talks about physicists who've used LSD

Wilhelm Reich In Hell: 33 (Capra and "fundamental holism")

see Sarfatti in Imaginary Weapons, pp.11-14

see Kripal's book on Esalen: 291-314 (Capra, Stapp, Sarfatti, F.A. Wolf, Nick Hergbert, Gary Zukav)

New Libertarian mag, RAW interview, 9/5/76: RAW recommends recent issue of Spit In The Ocean, for Sirag and Sarfatti on quantum consciousness Sarfatti as a "skeptical contactee"

Eight Circuit Brain by Antero Alli: 293-294 (mentions Saraffti and Sirag at RAW's salons in Berkeley hills, 1979)

I could list more if anyone's innarested.

Were they related to the SRI group with Targ and Puhoff: Scientologists? Who funded them? What role might Werner Erhard have played? How close was Ira Einhorn to the group?

How influential was Stapp? How did Barbara Honegger make it into the Reagan Administration? She wrote the first book titled October Surprise.

RAW had mentioned a few times that he sometimes played with the idea that he had been a "useful idiot" to the CIA or some other group.