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- Newsgroups: sci.physics
- Path: sparky!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!pacbell.com!well!sarfatti
- From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti)
- Subject: Sarfatti Bio FYI
- Message-ID: <Bt7GDy.62I@well.sf.ca.us>
- Sender: news@well.sf.ca.us
- Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
- Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 00:37:10 GMT
- Lines: 133
-
-
- From Lee Myers
- Horizon Way
- La Jolla, CA
- June 20, 1992
-
- Ms. Ann Matthews
- Princeton University
- Princeton,
- Dear Ann,
- I read your New York Times article on the Mac Arthur Foundation with great
- interest. Because I am certain that the "secret" nominating structure for
- grants produces a perpetuation of the impregnability of the cultural,
- artistic and scientific Mafia elite, I decided to write to you about a bona
- fide scientific genius in whom you might find interest and whose interests,
- by some miracle, you might see fit to serve in some way.
- I have been privy to the aforementioned "Mafia" in numerous discussions
- with my sister-in-law, brother, niece, nephew and wife among others who
- have, respectively, served or are serving as a member of the Commission of
- Fine Arts (a Carter appointee), a guest lecturer at Yale and guest
- professor at Haverford, a law professor at U.S.C., and an assistant
- professor at U.C.L.A. My wife continues at the bottom of this heap as a
- graduate student at U.C. Berkeley. She can testify most effectively about
- the literal contempt for creativity there.
-
- While a student at Cornell in the mid-fifties I associated with a group of
- talented mathematicians and physicists who were undergraduates. Among
- them, the most charismatic was Jack Sarfatti who was studying physics with
- Hans Bethe and Phillip Morrison. Jack and I encountered each other again
- in 1978 in San Francisco's Bohemian North Beach and have maintained a close
- personal friendship ever since. Herb Gold1 mentions Jack in several
- articles and books.2
-
- Jack had gotten a Ph.D. in physics3 and had resigned from his assistant
- professorship at San Diego State in 1971 in order to study with Oppenheimer
- and Einstein's student David Bohm at the University of London. Jack's
- scientific genius had become obsessed by an insight into the most
- perplexing anomaly of modern physics - namely, the "nonlocal" faster-than-
- light (FTL) and backward-in-time (BIT) quantum effects.
- Jack is a lucid teacher. He explained that these nonlocal quantum effects
- were originally discovered by Einstein on a visit to Cal Tech in 1934.
- Einstein showed that they were required in order that the Heisenberg
- uncertainty principle4 be true under all conceivable experimental
- conditions. In Einstein's mind, these effects were so disturbing5 that he
- believed that quantum mechanics was not a complete theory of the ultimate
- physical reality and that the Heisenberg principle could be violated. He
- began to change his mind shortly before his death and recent experiments6
- show that quantum mechanics is a complete theory.
- The recent experiments 7 have given Jack confidence in his original insight
- which he first got in 1960. Jack is involved in a debate with his
- colleagues at Berkeley, U.S.C. and elsewhere on how to use the nonlocal
- quantum connection between widely separated particles as a communication
- channel. Jack believes that he has the mathematical proof that quantum
- mechanics permits such communication. This so upsets his peers that most
- of them refuse to look objectively at his work. This situation is slowly
- changing8 as his presentations, sharpened by debate, get more and more
- refined and compelling.
-
- If Jack's mathematical manipulation of the late Richard Feynman's "path
- interpretation" of quantum mechanics is confirmed by a crucial quantum
- optical experiment, it would create a paradigm shift comparable to the
- introduction of Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory,
- Einstein's relativity, and the quantum theory. Confirmation would change
- our conception of the origin of the universe. Jack's hypothesis is that
- there is purpose, destiny and rich meaning to existence in that the
- universe is intelligently designed from the future by a super-intelligence
- that evolves from us. Jack's ideas are a development of the ideas of Sir
- Fred Hoyle and Professor John Archibald Wheeler. Cosmologists think that
- the universe evolved out of a quantum fluctuation. The idea is that the
- quantum fluctuation at the beginning of time was caused or shaped from the
- future. Hoyle writes of the "intelligent universe". Wheeler writes of the
- universe as a "self-excited circuit". These ideas are in the wind and have
- been described in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and
- Frank Tipler (Oxford, 1986). But no one has taken the idea as far as Jack
- has. What is important is that Jack has designed an experiment that can be
- done in a physics laboratory to test the idea.
-
- FTL and BIT communication on the quantum connection will have important
- technological and economic consequences. Quantum connection communication
- will allow new kinds of ultra-fast and ultra-intelligent quantum computers.
- It will allow the creation of a new kind of quantum telescope that will
- allow us to see the future universe just as classical telescopes allow us
- to see the past universe. Quantum connection communication will also have
- important insights for biology and medicine. Jack believes that the global
- control mechanisms for living systems require this effect.
-
- A Mac Arthur grant to create an Institute for New Physics directed by Jack
- would be an interesting experiment. Jack is at a disadvantage relative to
- his peers in that he has no salary or prestigious institutional affiliation
- having dropped out in the early seventies to pursue his magnificent
- obsession unfettered by petty politics, large teaching schedules and
- administrative chores. Now that Jack has completed his theory he is ready
- for such chores. Younger physicists are quite interested in his work. He
- should pass on the flame to the future. He is now 52.
-
- Should the romance of Jack's life and the pursuit of the scientific and
- artistic implications of his bold ideas interest you9, Jack can be reached
- at POB 26548, San Francisco, CA 94126, (415) 788 4510. The full details of
- his story are well worth hearing. Thank you for your time. I have
- attempted to keep this letter short.
- {\4}
-
- Sincerely,
- Lee Myers
- 1 Gold first met Jack at Cornell in 1957. Gold was substituting for
- Vladimir Nabokov who was writing the screenplay for Lolita.
- 2 Travels in San Francisco, the forthcoming Isles of Bohemia and most
- recently an article on the last of the Bohemians in Image magazine (Sunday
- Examiner Chronicle).
- 3UCR (1969) also M.S. from UCSD (1967)
- 4 the foundation stone of quantum mechanics.
- 5 Einstein called them "spooky telepathic actions at a distance".
- 6 not possible with the technology of Einstein's time.
- 7 photon pair experiments by Alain Aspect at the University of Paris,
- single-photon "delayed choice" experiments by Carroll Alley of the
- University of Maryland, gamma photon-hydrogen collision experiments
- reported in Physical Review by Charles Bennett of Lawrence Livermore
- Laboratory.
- 8 Jack has published a 22 page peer reviewed paper, "Design for a
- superluminal communication device" in Physics Essays, Vol 4, No. 3,
- September 1991.
- 9 It can safely be said that Jack Sarfatti is the greatest living
- conceptual artist using mathematical physics as the medium for his message.
-
- {PAGE|3}
-
- Lee Myers
- 2491 Horizon Way
- La Jolla, CA 92037
- (619) 453 0403
-
-
-
-