From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti)
Subject: Sarfatti Bio FYI
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 00:37:10 GMT


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



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