How far we have come from Jack Sarfatti’s vision of drugged CIA agents instantly receiving brain-wave communiqués from headquarters; or, indeed, from Nick Herbert’s metaphase typewriter, with which he had hoped to contact the spirit of Harry Houdini, and which Sarfatti credited as a major motivation behind Herbert’s FLASH scheme.123 Scratching just below the surface, however, some startling continuities begin to emerge. Sarfatti was not so far off the mark in trying to interest the defense establishment with “untappable” quantum-communication systems. Herbert’s FLASH design, while clearly unworkable, elicited a world of cutting-edge physics in its wake.
Back in 1983, the editor of Foundations of Physics had mentioned in his letter to the Trieste physicists GianCarlo Ghirardi and Tullio Weber that a few different critiques of Herbert’s FLASH proposal had come in. The no-cloning variety was one. Another focused on how lasers actually work at the single-photon level—a question that had never been broached until Herbert’s paper forced the issue onto the table. By the time he wrote his letter, the editor could point to some publications along these lines.124 The author of one of those articles heard about Herbert’s FLASH proposal at the Perugia conference in honor of Louis de Broglie in April 1982. Another likewise reported that he undertook his investigation in direct response to Herbert’s paper. Even Harvard’s Roy Glauber, who would later earn the Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum optics, got in on the act, deriving his own, neat argument against Herbert’s proposal.125
They each discovered a second reason why FLASH would fail. When stimulated by just a single photon, as in Herbert’s plan, lasers would spontaneously emit “noise” photons in random, uncorrelated states of polarization, at comparable levels to the stimulated, coherent radiation. In ordinary operation, lasers are stimulated by billions of photons at a time, and the “noise” photons don’t compete with the main output signal. But at the ultimate quantum limit, those unavoidable, extra photons would muddle the statistics at experimenter B’s detector and wash out Herbert’s predicted signal, even without taking into account the no-cloning theorem. (Herbert followed these developments closely, featuring them in his presentations at Esalen during the mid-1980s.)126 Alongside the no-cloning theorem, Herbert’s FLASH paper thus prompted a second major development: the first proof that no perfect amplifier could ever be built.
Despite all these developments, Charles Bennett recently dismissed efforts like Sarfatti’s and Herbert’s to design superluminal telegraphy. To Bennett, their determined quest for faster-than-light communication was no different from the perennial hunt for perpetual motion machines.127 It was clearly not meant to be a flattering comparison. Physicists often invoke perpetual motion machines as the ultimate hokum, the obsession of confused hacks, scheming charlatans, or both.
The comparison bears further consideration. Perpetual motion schemes only seem tainted with the scent of carnival from our vantage point today. Back in the late nineteenth century, however, careful scrutiny of perpetual motion proposals helped to elicit and clarify some of the crowning achievements in the study of heat, energy, and molecular motion. Only after a small band of experts had struggled through such profound conceptual knots as the conservation of energy and the meaning of entropy could scientists begin to dismiss perpetual motion machines in an intellectually legitimate way.128 Chasing perpetual motion machines today—as rogue inventors around the world continue to do—may rightly be dismissed as folly. Pursuing them a century or more ago proved to be remarkably productive, spurring major advances.
So, too, with the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s obsession with superluminal telegraphy. No one had produced a single principled argument to reject faster-than-light communication, in the light of Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement, until Sarfatti, Herbert, and others forced the issue. Only by puzzling through their detailed proposals, step by step, did the community discover deep, first-principles reasons why such schemes must fail. On our side of that dividing line—nearly three decades after developments like the no-cloning theorem—it is easy to dismiss their schemes as so much sophistry or self-delusion. Roy Glauber at Harvard put it best when he tackled Herbert’s proposal. “The same infernal ingenuity that once went into devising perpetual motion machines is now suggesting means for communicating faster than light,” he explained. “Some of these are interesting schemes,” Glauber made clear: “they too might just be capable of teaching us something.”129 Indeed, many textbooks on quantum information science have elevated the various critiques of superluminal communication to a founding principle known as the “no-signaling theorem.” The no-signaling theorem posits that no operations using entangled states can allow faster-than-light communication. Herbert’s FLASH scheme, in other words, has been elevated to a litmus test: if two quantum states appear, on paper, to be distinguishable, but if that distinction could be exploited to send signals faster than light, then the two states must not be distinguishable after all. Q.E.D.130
And yet, even as the latest textbooks tout the no-cloning theorem and its no-signaling spin-off, the fracas that started it all has faded from view. To date, the Wootters-Zurek no-cloning article in Nature has garnered more than 1100 citations in the scientific literature, reflecting its crowning importance and its high journal visibility. Dennis Dieks’s piece in Physics Letters has received roughly a third as many citations, still placing it in the upper tiers of influential physics papers. And what of Nick Herbert’s paper, which triggered it all? Herbert’s FLASH article has been cited just seventy-two times since its publication, most often in out-of-the-way philosophy journals.131 Herbert’s efforts certainly do not deserve equal credit to those of Eberhard and Stapp, Ghirardi and Weber, Wootters and Zurek, Dieks, or the others, but they clearly deserve some. Jack Sarfatti’s and Nick Herbert’s tireless pushing on the matter of Bell’s theorem and the ultimate implications of entanglement forced others to take those questions seriously; they put the matter onto other physicists’ agenda. Theirs was a mistake, but a wonderfully productive mistake.
Twenty-five years after Herbert’s FLASH paper appeared in print, the scheme received a proper laboratory test. In 2007, a team of Italian physicists who had been in contact with GianCarlo Ghirardi and Wojciech Zurek built a real-life version of Herbert’s imagined device. They fired it up, scrutinized their data, and drew their conclusion: alas, it hadn’t worked.132 Or had it? Herbert had anticipated just such a turn of events. Notes from the Esalen workshop of 1985 explain:
NICK HERBERT, after ten years of trying to signal faster than the speed of light, finally succeeded; unfortunately, there was no physical evidence of this historic precedent as, at the moment of his triumph, he instantaneously popped into the past where he was still trying to prove you can signal faster than the speed of light.133
Ain’t it always that way?
Chapter 10
The Roads from Berkeley
A few years ago Elizabeth [Rauscher] and I were talking about how important this group had really been in my own genesis of discovering ideas and hearing ideas that were really important to me, and getting feedback on my own ideas, and having a support group of people. It had been a pretty lonely road up until then. Having a support group that was really a critical mass made this a very important group, and I am glad that we are here together to honor it.
—George Weissmann, 2000
After meeting every week for nearly four years, the Fundamental Fysiks Group disbanded early in 1979. The proximate causes seemed clear at the time. Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, the group’s founders, had each completed their dissertations and were no longer available to manage the group’s logistics. Weissmann had secured a postdoctoral appointment in Europe, and Rauscher had become busy teaching as an adjunct assistant professor at Berkeley. Henry Stapp, the senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory who had been involved with the Fundamental Fysiks Group from the beginning, tried to keep the group going for a while but without much success. His other responsibilities
at the lab probably left little time for running the weekly discussion group. Some in the group also suspected that the lab’s administration had grown wary of allowing so many outsiders onto the site, which, after all, was a major government laboratory. Having started as a collection of about ten down-on-their-luck physicists, the Fundamental Fysiks Group had grown to attract forty or fifty participants—few of them affiliated with the laboratory—to several of its weekly sessions.1
Other factors likely played a role. Tensions and jealousies had emerged, stoked by the first glimmers of fame that books like Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters had attracted. Not long after Zukav’s book appeared, Sarfatti wrote a tart note to his onetime friend and collaborator, Saul-Paul Sirag. Sarfatti warned Sirag to stay clear of the “human potential narcissism” that he felt had begun to infect the others. “I am not looking for ‘followers’ but for tough minded professionals,” Sarfatti continued. “We do have a mission. If you do not feel that way then the idiots and frauds of the Esalen clique have destroyed your critical judgment.” (By this time Sarfatti had fallen out of favor with Esalen director Michael Murphy; Saul-Paul Sirag had taken over the reins with Nick Herbert for the annual Esalen workshops on Bell’s theorem.) “You are still a sorcerer’s apprentice,” Sarfatti closed. “Fame is spoiling you.”2
The feeling was mutual, at least for a while. When Sirag and Herbert founded their own spin-off group, the Consciousness Theory Group, they adopted one clear policy. The eclectic group ranged far and wide in its efforts to understand consciousness, experimenting with psychedelic drugs and consorting with psychics, shamans, and “sex magicians.” But, recalls Herbert, “we had our limits.” The one thing they dared not do: they refused to tell Jack Sarfatti where the group was meeting. After their years of experience with the Fundamental Fysiks Group, the Physics/Consciousness Research Group, and the Esalen workshops, they had become fed up with Sarfatti’s tendency to “monopolize the meeting with his own Obsession Du Jour.”3 Sarfatti, meanwhile, took out a personal ad in the Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Cal, challenging Fritjof Capra to a “duel of wits.” Claims and counterclaims began to swirl about who had stolen whose ideas, as major royalties began to accrue for some group members’ best-selling books.4
And so the once close-knit Fundamental Fysiks Group fell apart. The paths that core members have followed since that time are just as diverse and unexpected as the chance conjunctions that brought them together. Their individual journeys map out a range of possibilities, illustrating different ways one could carve out a career on the margins of modern-day physics. Some continued to rely on private patronage, of the sort they had earlier enjoyed from Werner Erhard, Michael Murphy, and George Koopman. Others made the leap to full-time authors, following the path that books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters had opened up. Still others became self-supporting entrepreneurs. And a few managed to remain close to mainstream physics, even as the occasional episode continued to remind them of their curious place in the disciplinary terrain.
Following Jack Sarfatti’s dramatic falling-out with Werner Erhard, his financial situation became desperate. His luxurious Nob Hill apartments were gone, replaced by a dingy little apartment “where two steps take you from the door to the smeary window that looks down on a rooftop and the bathroom is down the hall,” as a journalist described it in a San Francisco Chronicle profile. Sarfatti picked up menial jobs around San Francisco to try to make ends meet, but rarely stayed in them for long. He lost his job as a hotel porter, for example, because he couldn’t or wouldn’t learn how to shine shoes properly.5 He kept up his photocopy-and-postage activities (modeled on Ira Einhorn’s famous network) as long as he could, at one point complaining to physicist John Wheeler that he was “starv[ing] with no food, spending my last penny for xerox and mail.”6 All the while Sarfatti hoped that his latest corporate visions—still based on his faster-than-light communication schemes—might capture the right person’s imagination.
Sarfatti began to pull out of his downward spiral in the early 1980s. Perched at his regular location (Caffe Trieste, North Beach, San Francisco), he had fallen in with a curious crowd: politically conservative thinkers who were drawn to certain New Age ideas. Chief among them was A. Lawrence (“Lawry”) Chickering. A graduate of Yale Law School, Chickering worked for the conservative magazine National Review before returning to his native California in the early 1970s to direct the statewide Office of Economic Opportunity under Governor Ronald Reagan. Near the end of Reagan’s term, Chickering founded a new political think tank in San Francisco, the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and convinced such leading conservatives as Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger to join the Institute’s board. Chickering quickly became known as the intellectual leader of the “New Age Right.” Where others had seen only left-leaning collectivist ideas on display at Esalen or in the Eastern mysticism craze, Chickering discerned a strong element of “personal responsibility.” Borrowing from est and the human potential movement, Chickering tried to hone a new “therapeutic vocabulary,” as he explained to a journalist: some new means of discussing contentious political issues in a way that emphasized each faction’s common ground. When Reagan was elected president in 1980, and Meese and Weinberger joined the new cabinet, Chickering suddenly had the ear of the White House. Sarfatti, in turn, had the ear of Chickering.7
Chickering sent memos to highly placed bureaucrats in Reagan’s Defense Department touting Sarfatti’s work and lobbying for funds to support further research. At a March 1982 dinner in Washington, DC, hosted by Secretary of Defense Weinberger—until recently a board member of Chickering’s think tank—Chickering struck up a conversation with the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. He followed up with a long letter a week later, to describe in more detail “the work of a physicist friend of mine which just might have profound implications for certain aspects of the technology of warfare.”8
Chickering mentioned the CIA memorandum from 1979 that had expressed some interest in Sarfatti’s ideas, and then made his pitch. “Jack says that if in fact we can control the faster-than-light nonlocal effect,” then one could make “an untappable and unjammable command-control-communication system at very high bit-rates for use in the submarine fleet. The important point here is that since there is no ordinary electromagnetic or acoustic signal linking the encoder with the decoder in such a hypothetical system, there is nothing for the enemy to tap or jam.” “I know this sounds like science fiction” or even “occult ‘sympathetic magic,’” Chickering admitted, “but no one honestly knows for sure at this point.” Wouldn’t it be in the nation’s interest to invest a little of the Pentagon’s discretionary funding to test Sarfatti’s hypothesis, rather than ignoring the idea until some rival country ran with it instead?9 Sarfatti had already drawn up a proposal to establish a think tank of his own, “PSI: Physical Sciences Institute” (an all-too-obvious reference to “psi” or parapsychology), to advise the Reagan administration on “potential defense applications of the ‘new physics’ as they emerge.” Total cost: a meager $250,000 per year for five years (nearly $600,000 per year in 2010 dollars), mere chump change on the scale of the Pentagon’s budget.10 Chickering could see the merit of the proposal, as he wrote to the undersecretary of defense: “God knows what other clever ideas he [Sarfatti] and his crew of eccentric geniuses might come up with if they were properly supported.”11
Chickering’s memo did not generate funds for Sarfatti. The undersecretary suggested that Sarfatti confer with the JASON group, an elite corps of civilian physicists whom the Pentagon consulted on defense matters, while an Air Force colonel held out for a “summarization of Dr. Sarfatti’s latest findings” before promising any funds, and a different assistant secretary of defense expressed only preliminary interest.12 But the connection with Chickering introduced Sarfatti to a whole new network of people. Around the time of his memo to the Pentagon, for example, Chickering a
nd a friend (the wife of the Reagan administration’s new ambassador to France) met in Paris with physicist Alain Aspect, right in the midst of Aspect’s groundbreaking experiments on Bell’s theorem, to convey messages from Sarfatti.13 When an editor of the journal Foundations of Physics compared Sarfatti’s unusual position to that of another “rogue” physicist who also sought to challenge physics orthodoxy without a stable institutional position, Sarfatti was quick to draw a distinction. “The difference is that I am now getting a sympathetic hearing at the highest levels of President Reagan’s Administration—I mean the highest.”14
Newly immersed in Chickering’s circle, Sarfatti’s political leanings swung solidly to the right. He began to write with characteristic ire about the leftist excesses of people and groups with whom he had enjoyed close relations only a few years earlier. A typical rant dismissed “charlatans and ‘New Age’ anti-rationalists of the drug-crazed and meditation-glazed ‘counter-culture,’” with their “pop-Eastern mysticism.”15 His ideas about harnessing quantum entanglement likewise began to reflect the latest political hues. For example, Sarfatti imagined fulfilling Reagan’s famous call to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”—the phrase Reagan used in March 1983 when announcing his new Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars program—by shooting entangled quantum particles at enemy missiles from space-based battle stations. The particles would induce harmless nuclear reactions inside the warheads, rendering the fissionable material inert. Unlike many of his other brainstorms about Bell’s theorem, this one made it into print, appearing in the journal Defense Analysis in the mid-1980s.16
How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival Page 28
