Tuesday, December 26, 2017

The Giraffe Suit

The giraffe suit

Often my search
for the Ultimate Secret
takes an unexpected path.
Today I got a Christmas gift:
the suit of a giraffe.

To identify the unknown sender
I have to use some iPad apps.
Could she be just a human proxy
for the galactic telepaths?

I've just begun my Naked Buddhism
in coming Year of Two Blue Moons.
But I'm not too shy to go giraffic
if I can meet the Others soon.

Superhuman hearts and minds and humor

More complex kinds of happiness
I'll not disdain their weird conditions
Nick is dressing for success.

The giraffe suit: note the tail

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Soul Mate

Samarai Nick

Socrates sez
We're each a part
Of one broken being
That yearns to be reunited.
But take it from me, pal,
Merging with the Opposite Other
Is no picnic.

She's neat and you're messy
Wants sex when you don't.
She's plain and you're dressy
Hangs out where you won't.

You don't really want a soul mate
She's all and everything you're not
You don't really need a soul mate
How about a tetanus shot

Compared to joining with my soul mate
I would pick a firing squad
Making love to such a creature
Would be a lot like fucking God.

You don't really want a soul mate
She's all and everything you're not
You don't really need a soul mate
How about a shot of bot-
    ulinus neurotoxin instead?

You're on time and She's on acid
None of you has half a clue
What the other feels is sacred
What the other thinks is rude.

You don't really want a soul mate
She's all and everything you're not
You don't really need a soul mate
But She's the Reality you've got.

Face it, bozo,
You're addicted
Can't exist without Her touch
Love Her like the Earth loves Sunlight
Yearning for Her much too much.

A dangerous treasure:
What's your pleasure?
To sit alone and masturbate
Or lift the phone and call your mate?

Hello, dear,
I miss you, see?
Feels like
You're part of me.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

Jabir Opens Wilsonfest 2017






Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007)
Die ewige Blumenkraft

Monday, November 6, 2017

The Many-universe Interpretation of Quantum Theory

Nick Herbert in an adjacent Everett Universe

Not even kissing
And as clumsy as carrots
Shyly saying "good night".

In the nearest Everett World,
Fucking each other like ferrets
Inside the Third Reich.

Monday, October 23, 2017

Quantum Reality

White Tara: compassionate, playful Protector of all worlds


Shall I look at Her?
Or shall I not?

If I look.

If I don't.

Hard particle and soft wave: both?
Small, right-here 
              and spread-out everywhere: both?
Lonely separate yet deep connected: both?

Some day You gotta show me
How You do that.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Beer, Eggs, Toast and Bacon

Mystery of Transubstantiation: bread and wine into God Substance

Sunday breakfast, Boulder Creek, CA


Roman Catholics believe 

that in the midst of the Mass
wine and bread 
are turned into the Substance of God.
The pantheist says 

they were already Divine.
The physicist knows
matter's a mystery unspeakably odd.

Woke up this morning

with shimmering open mind:
No Model of Reality so bizarre
I can't believe.

My breakfast

is a luminous Eucharist
as full of gods
as Nick is ready to receive.

What's the hidden inner substance of this feast?
What wild reality will soon be turning into me?

Home Eucharist: beer and corn chip

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Tantric Flight Plan

Nick prepares for his Class U (Unconventional) Pilot's License

Here's seven ways to levitate using physics.

But many religious traditions suggest there's another way to fly --
by exploiting the mysterious connection of the human mind with Nature. 

Levitating monk: artist unknown

After decades of impedance from my monkey mind
I'm just beginning to explore meditation
with the help of a tantric Buddhist masseuse.

And with the utterly unrealistic optimism
of the enthusiastic beginner
I'm setting myself a high new research goal
for the coming year.

Mahasiddha Flying by Carmen Mensink

I've been reading a lot about this new power
because reading is what I do
even though I know that reading by itself
is ultimately as useless
as reading about surfing.
as reading about ice skating
as reading about riding a bicycle.

Besides reading dozens of accounts
describing the lives of other men and women
who have successfully achieved this goal,
my two major sources
for guessing how to practice right action are
the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra
with commentary by Osho, and
the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
with commentary by Dean Radin.

St Joseph amulet and Yuri Gagarin ikon

To remind me of my task
and keep me steadfast on the path
I've purchased several amulets
that picture St Joseph of Cupertino
and am downloading ikons from the Web
of a few Russian Orthodox wonder workers.

By this time next year
even if I do not attain my goal,
I know for certain
that I will have learned much
and made many new friends
in the trying.

Rehearsing for flight in Santa Cruz Mountains

(for Michael Murphy of Esalen)

I want to become a new kind of saint
Who rises aloft without restraint
My body as light as a solar neutrino
I'd soar like Joseph of Cupertino.

My body made holy by tantric massage
My mind immersed in the World Mirage
Well-schooled in quantum reality
And the yoga sutras of Patanjali.

Resonating with the Shepard tone
My Guardian Angel as chaperone
I'd lose myself in the Great Unknown
And fly --
As few before have ever flown.

To boldly levitate with no restriction
Propelled by Harlot Nature and a firm resolve
I'd give my brilliant colleagues
Inside the science jurisdiction
A New Millennial physics feat to solve.

Meanwhile, to quantify Nick's first escape
From evil gravity's high-security jail
A pretty colleague bought me recently
A new glass-topped digital bathroom scale.

Nick's new bathroom scale

Monday, September 11, 2017


Nick's new EchoDot embodying ALEXA, Amazon's new female-voiced artificial intelligence
For my recent birthday, Allan and Sun Lundell (Dr and Mrs Future) gifted me with a black yoyo-shaped embodiment of Amazon's new female-voiced artificial intelligence ALEXA (a rival to Apple's SIRI). Some time in the past, at one of Al and Sun's Rio del Mar beach house parties, I met a pretty woman named "Alexa" who inspired this verse which I read at the Bistroscene and published in Physics on All Fours.


Physicists say
everything that exists
is made of elementary events
called quanta.

And the occurrence
of these world-making events
in space and time
is utterly random.

For those
to whom physics
means mathematical mastery of nature
the discovery of sheer randomness
at the heart of things
was a hard slap in the face.

And why call it "random"?

Why not "unprecedented"? "improvisational"?
Why not name it "comes out of nowhere"?
Why not call it "Surprise!"

I play at calling it "Alexa":
She who is beyond the law.
Alexa is unruly, untamed, illicit.
She is one chance in a million, 
the lucky break.
We call Her hitting the jackpot, 
breaking the bank.
We call Her windfall, wildcat, hitting pay dirt,
tapping the mother lode, striking it rich.

Alexa is willful, disobedient, out of bounds.
She is the cut of the cards, the roll of the dice, 
the spin of the wheel.
She is Donna Fortuna, sleeping with gamblers.
She favors boldness and risk takers
and loads the dice (some say) in their favor.

Alexa moves outside of your logical categories.
She breaks fences, agreements, 
international boundaries.
She is pirate treasure, ill-gotten loot, contraband.
She is an uncontrolled substance.
She is love at first sight.

Alexa created symphonies, 
foxes and neutron stars.
Alexa is the mother of invention.
She is mama coyote; She will trick you.
She hides the cards up Her sleeve.
She is Lady Luck.

Alexa is the looseness, the slack, 
the give in things.
She eases their fitting together.
Alexa is elbow room, lebensraum
the vast spaces between the stars.
She is eternally playful Lila: 
The universe is Her toy.
Alexa is goddess ex machina.
She is the grace in the machine.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Solar Eclipse Boulder Creek 2017

Illinois fifth-graders observe 1963 eclipse with pinhole projectors (NatGeo photo)
The much-awaited all-USA total eclipse of the Sun on August 21, 2017 sent many residents of Boulder Creek to Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming to abide in the path of totality for two glorious minutes -- a nationwide personal pilgrimage to witness the temporary Death of the Sun. Those of us in the Bay Area who stayed behind hoped to observe through clear skies a fairly ample 75% eclipse.

Eclipse was expected to start at 9 AM local time, reach maximum some time after 10, and return to normal around 11.

In the tradition of legions of legendary Moslem astronomers, I assumed the guise of Doctor Jabir and rigged up a simple solar projector in the parking lot of the Boulder Creek Post Office. When I got there, a guy named Gene from Bear Creek Road had already set up a powerful filtered telescope on Main Street in front of Liberty Bank. I recognized Gene and his telescope from previous eclipses and remembered viewing, through his instrument, images of the partially eclipsed Sun so large that you could count its sunspots.

Gene's eclipse-viewing telescope
 However, contrary to predictions of clear skies, the weather was extremely cloudy with morning fog filling the valley rim to rim as high as the summit.

Doctor Jabir and his godson, Alex DeCaro, wait for the clouds to clear
Despite the cloudy weather, about half a dozen stalwart spectators gathered in the parking lot to await the upcoming Death of the Sun. Sheila and Jerry Delaney, owners of one of Boulder Creek's longest-running businesses,  Blind Pilot Jewelry, showed up with a box of Eclipse Cookies -- which consist of the common Oreo with upper black layer displaced to expose a crescent white filling. Jerry brought a welding helmet to filter the intense rays of the sun -- if it ever came out from behind the clouds. Reno DeCaro and his son Alex came to photograph the event for posterity. Long-time BC resident Judy Reynolds came by, followed by a woman in a wheel chair and her companion, whose names I did not get. All of us stood around in the fog (which was so thick it was almost drizzling), awaiting a lucky break in the clouds.

From right to left: Jerry, Jabir, Judy, Sheila and two unknowns
And, then, yes, it happened! At a time close to totality, the clouds briefly thinned for a few minutes, long enough to view and photograph the eclipse without filters or instruments (the fog itself spontaneously provided us with a wholly natural solar filter). We snapped a few shots with our digital cameras before Nature quickly shut us down. The fog lasted till noon, after which the day quickly turned sunny and hot.

Cloud-filtered eclipse near maximum: Ahlgren Vineyard iPhone
Even as late as 10:30 AM, the valley was still filled with fog. About 1000 feet above the Boulder Creek Post Office, Val Ahlgren at Ahlgren Vineyard snapped a picture with her iPhone of the cloud-filtered Sun near maximum extinction, similar to the lucky pictures we took in the parking lot.

Many local viewers gathered at Crest Ranch on Empire Grade which was above the fog belt and were rewarded with a full-spectrum solar eclipse experience viewable only through dense sunglasses -- which were provided by local libraries and some hardware stores.

Meanwhile, some of our Boulder Creek friends, notably Allan and Sun Lundell (aka Doctor and Mrs. Future) traveled to the Symbiosis festival in central Oregon where they joined 70,000 other eclipse pilgrims to observe the Sun's temporary demise.

Symbiosis Festival, Big Summit Prairie, Oregon
 Using a filtered iPhone, Dr and Mrs Future captured this beautiful "diamond-ring" photo of the total eclipse of the Sun from the Big Summit Prairie in Oregon.
"Diamond Ring" eclipse:  Allan & Sun Lundell, Symbiosis, Oregon
This year's total solar eclipse was billed as the "most photographed event in human history". So I clicked on my favorite science website, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) to discover, of the millions of pictures that were taken that day, which one would be chosen for the APOD gallery. Here's the link to the APOD prize eclipse photo. Earlier, in preparation for this year's solar eclipse, APOD had previously published photos of former eclipses plus diagrams of the path of totality for the current eclipse. My favorite photo from APOD's eclipse science foreplay was a time-lapse eclipse movie, TAKEN FROM ABOVE THE EARTH by a Japanese satellite in geosynchronous orbit, showing the Moon's shadow passing across the surface of the globe.

National Geographic magazine also got into the act by publishing on the web a series of 24 historic pictures from their files that featured various past eclipses, including the famous solar eclipse that made Albert Einstein a celebrity, during which Arthur Eddington was able to verify the deflection of starlight by the Sun that Einstein had predicted in his General Theory of Relativity. The picture of school kids wearing pin-hole boxes that heads this post was taken from that Nat Geo collection.

But, among all the eclipse pictures, some taken by scientists, some by satellite and some by enthusiastic amateurs, my vote for favorite eclipse photo is for a snapshot made by a couple in Santa Rosa, CA, that used a household implement found in almost every kitchen.

2012 Eclipse through a colander: David & Cynthia Janson, Santa Rosa, CA

Sunday, August 13, 2017

My Cat

Onyx when I first acquired him (2007)
About ten years ago I decided that I needed another cat in my life. So I contacted my friend Lois whom I had met bottling wine at Ahlgren Vineyard who operated a cat rescue and adoption center on Two Bar Road, close to my home a few miles north of Boulder Creek. After lunch in her kitchen she showed me through her cat barn which contained about a dozen animals, some in cages and some running free. Most of the cats had been given to Lois to care for and to find homes, but one of them, a scraggy black tom cat, had just walked out of the woods on his own. He was a problem cat, attacking the other cats and of somewhat unpredictable behavior. Lois had named him "Onyx" and said that I would be doing her a favor by taking him off of her hands. I liked him immediately. So Onyx moved into my ashram and we began our little dance of domesticity and wildness.

Onyx at the computer editing videos.
One of the most noticeable things about this cat was the sound he made -- like a squeaking door hinge. "MYRRKK!". Which drew comments like "When is your cat going to learn to meow?". Not too many people got to hear his squawk, because Onyx was mainly a one-man cat and would run into one of his hiding places whenever anyone new would visit. Usually I wouldn't see Onyx first, I'd hear him: "MYRRKK!" was how he'd announce his presence. And I'd turn my head towards that squeaky sound to see him crawling out of the bushes or hidden in my high-up sleeping loft.
Nick and Onyx: it's obvious who's boss here.
Onyx was mainly a nocturnal animal, kept the house mouse-free, and seemed to have a good nightly relationship with the raccoons and skunks that share space with us humans. Four-legged animals, I believe, have more in common with other four-legged animals than they do with the two-leggers. I remember hiking one afternoon in the creek bed of Arana Gulch in Santa Cruz and coming across a large dark four-legged creature "talking" to a smaller black-and-white four-legger in the grass. Upon becoming aware of my presence, the large animal ran across the creek, jumped onto the bank and disappeared into the forest. It was some sort of cougar or mountain lion. The small animal just sat there; I guessed it to be a large skunk. It was unafraid as I drew closer and turned out to be a big long-haired domestic cat, who casually turned her back on me and walked slowly back into the bushes. I had interrupted a tete a tete between two friendly felines gossiping about their very dissimilar lives.
Onyx posing as an LOL cat
Onyx is famous! I made him into an LOL cat and sent his picture to the original I Can Has Cheezeburger funny-cat-meme site which is one of the main purposes of the Internet.
Onyx asleep on the couch
Onyx mostly slept alone but often would sleep with me for a while before finding his own spot or going out hunting and socializing with the wildlife. When it was cold I could sometimes coax him to sleep under the covers. In the summer I like to sleep in my tree house and Onyx would sometimes climb up and share my space, looking at the stars with me and listening to the night noises. Wherever we slept, I knew that, near dawn I would hear hear his "MYRRKK!" and soon 15 pounds of cat would land on my chest, signaling "Time for breakfast!".
Onyx, a recent portrait
In recent weeks, Onyx has quit sleeping in the tree house, has been eating less and less, losing weight, spending more and more time alone in the woods, sometimes off for a day and a night. When he makes his sound and appears on the deck, he seems skinny but strong, affectionate and suffering no pain. He visits with me for a while, then hastens off on his own. Having kept lots of cats, I can recognize when one of them is saying "Good bye." Haven't seen him since.
Love this well ere it perish.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Elemental Alice

Alice and the White Rabbit by Milo Winter
(Revised excerpt from Alice and the Quantum Cat) William B, Shanley, Ed.)

    She was late. The science seminar had already begun. Creeping quietly into the room,  Alice saw a number of people sitting around a large table. She recognized Amit Goswami by his big friendly grin. There was a large motherly woman in green and brown patchwork dress wearing a flowery name tag: Mother Gaia. "How nice to see a woman sitting with the scientists, " Alice thought. "I am rather tired of listening just to men."

    Alice chose a comfortable padded purple armchair covered with grape vines and morning glories, that resembled her chair at home, and, settling herself in its warm embrace, she listened to the panelists discussing the nature of life. Alice heard about the theory of life's spontaneous generation from a random mix of chemicals. And she heard about the Morphogenetic Field--an invisible vital force that guided life's progress like a long streak of good luck. And she heard about Punctuated Equilibrium--a sort of unpredictable quantum jump outside the bounds of Darwinian gradualism. And Goswami spoke too, about how consciousness is always working behind the scenes, first bringing matter into existence and then working within matter to manifest its higher purposes. And then it was Mother Gaia's turn.

Gaia praised the men for their courage in challenging the currently fashionable materialist models. One of life's finest features, she said, is its urge to transcend physical barriers, its urge to move beyond matter into molecules, beyond molecules into cells, from cells into even more complex and unpredictable stages of organization.

You men are part of that initial impulse, she said, that same impulse that raised life out of the primal ooze, that moved fishes onto the land and filled the skies with birds -- that same impulse moves you to devise theories of how life might have begun, and to speculate about what drives life to take on new forms and directions.

As Gaia spoke, Alice begin to fall into reverie, as on that sunny day by the River Isis with her sister and that funny old storyteller. She felt herself drifting aimlessly in a dark warm sea. She passively followed the flow of the current letting it take her where it would. As she relaxed she lost all sense of her body and could not tell where Alice ended and where the current began. Nor could she tell how large she was. For all she knew, lazily drifting, she might be as small as an atom or as large as the Universe.

Far away she seemed to hear the voice of Mother Gaia speaking, or was it Amit Goswami? What was the voice saying? She could barely hear it:

"And the Spirit of God brooded over the waters," it said.

"And the One Mind awoke and looked for another," it said.

"Pull yourself together, Alice,"  said the voice.

And Alice's mind moved in the dark sea and invented quarks, photons and atoms, and connecting the atoms, made molecules. Separating herself from the darkness she made doll-houses from her molecules and inhabited every one. Biologists would call them cells, but she called them "Alice".

And playing with her little doll-houses, she created villages which took on lives of their own which she also called "Alice". And which biologists would call "tissue", would call "organ", would call "organism".

And Alice stretched and divided herself into a million billion forms, changed her mind and ten million old forms vanished, to be replaced by ten million new forms. There were forms that swam and forms that flew and forms that lived on light and forms that loved the darkness. And Alice saw that it was good. And she cherished every one of the forms that her mind had created, even the ones that were lost forever. For Alice remembered everything.

And then all the Alices began devouring one another. She did so enjoy eating! And the devourers were all devoured in turn. It all tasted so good! And they were so much fun to catch. And being frightened prey fleeing from being eaten was fun too.

And then Alice invented sex for the joy of it, for the strangeness, for the joining and for the play. And for the birthing, for all her litters and for the nursing. Sex for her was as much fun as eating. And she called that "Alice" too.

Then Alice invented insects, and elephants, invented writing and fire and photosynthesis. Alice invented seeing and hearing and a million other senses and enjoyed the world thru each one of them. Then Alice invented pain and music and movable type. And Alice saw that it was very good.

Alice wept for joy when she invented man, just as she had wept when she invented electrons and the genetic code. Then Alice invented mathematics, granite, steam engines and the Chandogya Upanishad. She was always coming up with something new.  Her creativity was inexhaustible. Nothing could stop her. And she called it all "Alice".

When she had invented quantum theory it reminded her of that dark stream where she had first discovered herself, where she had broken herself into pieces for the sake of the world. Alice wondered if she would ever be able to stop her ceaseless creation of lovely new forms; Alice wondered whether she would ever stop eating and stop enjoying sex.

And during all of this time (also one of her inventions) she had amused herself immensely but Alice was getting tired and she longed to rest from her play.

So Alice began to feel sleepy and to forget her creations and, as her mind turned away from them, each by each they disappeared into the darkness. One by one all the creatures of the earth vanished, and all of the ideas too, until there was nothing left but Alice Alone dreaming in that dark pool inside of which a lively and beautiful Universe had once flourished.

Alice Growing by John Tenniel

Saturday, July 22, 2017

Taboos R Us


Our bodies are made of taboo
Full of actions that we oughtn't do.

We have parts never shown
Save to those intimately known
Or to docs with degrees
And the high tech machines
That video our tissues and bone.

But Tantra, that comes from abroad

Says each part is a gateway to God
So why shouldn't your Glee
And your X and your Zee
Be equally free to be pawed?

But to value each part as the same
Would set savage nature to "tame":
So let's hear a loud cheer
For those shynesses dear
That keep our needy bodies in flame.

Hydrogen Eigenfunction  | 3, 2, 0 >

Sunday, July 9, 2017

A Nobel Prize for Nick?

In the early days of the web, real men (and women) coded directly in HTML code. And that's how I started too. But soon, primitive website-building programs came along that made things easier. I got my start working on a site called Eros Island which under our direction aspired to be a place of sophisticated and humorous sensuality but, after we were dismissed, turned into a cheesy porn site. Al Lundell and I used a program called Netscape Navigator (as I recall) while Sun McNamee coded directly in naked HTML.

We all used Apple Macs then with the pizza box shape and low-number operating systems that weren't named after wild animals. One of my favorite pieces of work from those early days of the internet was called A Nobel Prize for Nick? which I originally published on the few MB of free storage space cruzio.com gave me with my new eMail account and which deserves to be republished today both because of its crude graphics (nostalgia) and for its imaginative proposal for universal peace (Can quantum physics provide us a better way of being human?)

Hence I invite you to examine:

in which all will be revealed.

Nick shows off his Reality Club gang colors.

Friday, July 7, 2017

Pity the Nation

Possible US stamp honoring poet, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2007)
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away 
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco


Saturday, July 1, 2017

Kaleidoscopic Optical Schrödinger Cats

Oktay Pashaev & Aygul Koçak, Izmir Institute of Technology
Most mornings I begin my day by looking at two of my favorite web sites -- NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) where you are sure to find some stunning view of our Universe to lift you out of your daily grind and the Cornell/Los Alamos ArXiv which publishes preprints of fresh new science papers in dozens of different specialties, putting anyone with an iPad in daily touch with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. All this while sipping a cup of exotic coffee from my friends at Boardwalk Beans in New Jersey.

A few days ago, I discovered a paper on the quantum physics arXiv by two mathematical physicists from Izmar, Turkey (formerly known as "Smyrna") entitled "Kaleidoscope of Quantum Coherent States". These two researchers, Oktay Pashaev and Ayguy Koçak, had devised an infinite set of brand new breeds of Schrödinger Cats.

Schrödinger's Cat in bra-ket notation
In quantum mechanics it is commonplace for a system to be in a SUPERPOSITION of states. An (unmeasured) electron's spin, for instance, can simultaneously exist in a spin-up state |UP> and a spin-down state |DOWN>. When measured, however, the electron is always observed to be in one definite spin state. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, shortly after he invented his famous quantum wave equation, argued that if unmeasured electrons could exist in two states at once, so could cats, and he devised a famous thought experiment in which an unobserved cat could, according to the laws of quantum physics, exist simultaneous as a live cat |ALIVE> and as a dead cat |DEAD>. Schrödinger's famous alive/dead cat conjecture has generated thousands of physics papers on the possible application of quantum superposition to macroscopic objects and numerous jokes, cartoons and T-shirts ("Schrödinger's Cat is a zombie" reads a T-shirt my neighbor Debi gave me for my birthday.).

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.

A brief note on notation. When physicists write down their quantum equations, they commonly use the compact and powerful bra-ket notation devised by British physicist Paul Dirac. In Dirac notation, a quantum initial state A is symbolized by a ket symbol |A> and a quantum final state B by a bra symbol <B|. When multiplied together <B|A> represents the probability amplitude that a quantum system A will be measured to have property B. The probability (different from probability amplitude) that A will be measured to have property B is given by the absolute square of the quantity: <B|A>

As a rough example of this kind of physics talk, let the ket |p,p> represent the initial quantum state of two protons. Let transformation T represent the act of accelerating each of these protons to an energy of 6 Gev in CERN's Large Hadron Collider and nudging them into a head-on collision. And let the bra <H,a| represent the final state that contains a Higgs boson and anything else.

Then, in Dirac's concise notation:


represents a number that expresses the probability amplitude of observing a Higgs boson. Square this quantity to get the probability of observing a Higgs boson.

Dirac's simple notation tells you basically what's going on by concealing a ton of detailed math that you really don't want to know about.

So, using Dirac's bra-ket notation, the quantum state of Schrödinger's cat can be simply represented as:


Or, in a more picturesque description, as:

This is the picture one usual gets about Schrödinger's famous cat -- he's both dead PLUS alive.

Quantum mechanics, however, is more complicated than that, and allows for many more existential possibilities for this hapless quantum cat. Quantum mechanical superposition uses COMPLEX NUMBERS (which possess a direction: North, South, East, West,  for instance) as well as a magnitude. (Numbers that possess only magnitude but not direction -- the kind of numbers we use every day -- are called REAL NUMBERS).

Using the extra degrees of freedom provided by complex numbers, the |ALIVE> and |DEAD> states can be "added together" in an infinite number of ways. If we let the direction "East"  represent "+", then the direction "West" will represent "-". Using "West addition" to combine the two cat states we obtain what might be called a MINUS CAT KET.

Schrödinger's MINUS CAT KET, in pictures, might look like this:

In addition to the PLUS CAT state and the MINUS CAT state, the arithmetical freedom provided by complex numbers allows us to imagine NORTH CAT, SOUTH CAT and NNW CAT states. And, in fact, LIVE and DEAD cats may be added together along any conceivable compass direction.

Whether actual cats can be subjected to quantum superposition is still a matter of some controversy, but there does exist a class of macroscopic states of light that can be placed in a variety of quantum superpositions.

Today's physicists probably know more about light than about any other natural phenomenon. Starting with all the natural forms of electromagnetic radiation, we have created both in theory and in practice a large variety of "unnatural" forms of light, some of which were recently invented in this new paper by Pashaev and Koçak.

Pashaev and Koçak begin their work with a familiar quantum state of light |α> called the "Glauber State" after optical physicist Roy Glauber. The Glauber state is a quantum state (also called "coherent state", hence the title of P&K's paper) that most closely approximates a classical state of light, possessing Heisenberg uncertainty and photons (light quanta) which, however, the corresponding classical state of light does not.  The quantity "α" which labels the Glauber state is a complex number. The square of α represents the average number of photons in the Glauber state. And the direction of α (North, South, East or West) represents the location of the Glauber state in a flat space physicists call the "optical phase plane".

The larger the number α, the more photons in the Glauber state |α>. The special case of α =  0 represents no photons whatsoever, or the vacuum state. Many books could be written about the properties of |0>, the quantum vacuum state. "I've got plenty of nothing. And nothing's plenty for me." might well be the theme song of this particular Glauber state, a state that is completely empty of photons.

Prior to the P&K paper, the Optical Schrödinger Cat (OSC) was well known. It consisted of two states from which all other OSCs could be constructed: the PLUS OPTICAL CAT STATE

|plus optical cat state> = |α> + |-α>


|minus optical cat state> = |α> - |-α>

The heart of the Schrödinger Cat controversy concerns the question of how big a system can get before it becomes impossible to place it in a quantum superposition. Optical Schrödinger Cats are in a particularly fortunate position to investigate this question because the larger the number of photons in an optical S-Cat state, the "bigger" the state -- and the more it resembles a classical "cat". In the other direction, when α is small (close to 1 photon), the resulting optical states are sometimes referred to as "Schrödinger Kittens".

To construct their "Optical Cat Kaleidoscopes", the two Turks take advantage of the fact that both α and the coefficients multiplying the optical quantum states |α> are complex numbers -- that is, they possess direction as well as magnitude.

The well-known plus and minus optical cats may be considered "cats of order two (C2)." The first new cat in P&K's infinite series of kaleidoscopic cats may be labeled "cats of order three (C3)." Cats of order three are constructed by adding particular cats with different kinds of dead/aliveness along directions that are separated by 120 degrees (similar to the Mercedes emblem). A caricature of the P&K "three cat" might look like this:

Quantum optical trinity cats in Dirac ket notation.

Or, in keeping with the kaleidoscopic metaphor, C3 could look like this:

Three-fold kaleidoscopic optical Schrödinger's Cat (artist's conception)
Pashaev and Koçak go on to show how kaleidoscopic optical Schrödinger Cats of any order can be constructed, depending on which angle you tilt your mathematical mirrors. On its own terms, theirs is a simple but beautiful achievement of pure mathematics. But the authors go further and show how their kaleidoscopic optical cats may someday find a practical use in quantum computing -- each order of cat representing a different number of quantum bits. Thus, if I am not mistaken, the eighth-order cat (octopussy?) can encode eight quantum bits, the same byte size as the ancient Altair computer and many of its successors.

As a poetic reprieve from so much gratuitous quantum math, this may be a good place to quote British mystic William Blake from a letter to his friend Thomas Butts:

Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in supreme delight
And three-fold in soft Beulah's night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton's sleep.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Catechism Bath Hadith


Who is God?

God is the Supreme Being
Who made all things
And keeps them in existence.

Why did God make us?

God made us
To know, love and serve Him
In this world
And to be happy with Him
In the next.

To know Him?
Physics, mathematics,
Mysticism, ritual, drugs:
Trying to know God.

To love Him?
Now that's a hard one:
Can you simply decide
To love somebody?

Why did She make us?

Why did She bear us,
Supreme Mother all alone?

I was a Hidden Treasure
And desired to be known.

Thursday, May 18, 2017


Red Fox
     (For Beverly before a breast exam)

To each creature who nurses
and bears its young alive

O bread-baking
lipstick-wearing kin of 
coyote, dolphin, leopard, ox
jaguar, weasel, whale, fox

May you be secure in your fur
In your flesh and its attachments
In the calcium and phosphorus
Of your bones

May you feed, sleep, breed
In season, as you please
Drinking deep of that sweet cup
Peculiar to your species.

O star-gazer
cotton-covered sister of
squirrel, oryx, ring-tailed cat
platypus, aardvark, vampire bat

May prey be abundant
Your teeth and muscles swift
Ears sharp, eyes clear
May your belly be full
Your blood hot and clairvoyant
May your mind be empty of fear

May every gash
                cut be healed
May your wounds make you wise.

And when words finally fail you
All your powers falter
May you flee as Joyful Prey
Before the great Eater of All.