John Wisniewski interviews Nick Herbert

Nick Herbert 

Many Robert Anton Wilson fans will know about Nick Herbert, the physicist and author who is mentioned in the first Cosmic Trigger book and who wrote a popular introduction to quantum mechanics, Quantum Reality.  I have mentioned him many times at this blog. Herbert's own blog is called Quantum Tantra. 

John Wisniewski has done a number of interviews that have been published here. You can read interviews with David Halperin, Tea Krulos, Adam Gorightly and John Higgs. 

Mr. Wisniewski is a freelance writer who has written for L.A. Review of Books, AMFM magazine and Cultured Focus, among other publications. 

John Wisniewski: Nick, what did Robert Anton Wilson "steal" from you?

Nick Herbert: Writers like Bob are always searching for new ideas. And they will take them wherever they can get them. Hang out with a writer long enough and he/she will get them from you. When I heard that RAW had worked for Playboy in Chicago I asked him this question. Every month Playboy conducts an unprecedented massive experiment in sexual telepathy. For a whole month the centerfold gal has a million men masturbating to her image. As far as you know, does she experience anything different during Masturbation Month? Bob answered not that he was aware of.

A while later I was reading RAW's Schrǒdinger's Cat hot off the presses and ran across his character Carol Christmas who was a centerfold for Pussycat, a men's magazine like Playboy. During her month, she became sexually voracious and irresistible to men, a veritable sex goddess with all the complications that entailed. Ha, I thought, Bob stole my idea. And invented the Carol Christmas Effect.

JW: When and how did you meet Robert?

NH: I've already described how I met Bob thru an introduction in Berkeley from mathematician Saul-Paul Sirag from the Center for Study of Consciousness on Benvenue St. Saul-Paul had contributed a chapter to RAW's Cosmic Trigger and knew him pretty well.

JW: When you were searching for what quantum physics really was, were there those who suggested that you don't look into this?

NH: When Einstein came up with Special Relativity, it was said that only six people understood it. Certainly an underestimate. When the Irishman John Stewart Bell came up with his now famous quantum nonlocality theory in 1964, only SIX PEOPLE CARED. I was one of them. Most physicists who had heard of Bell's Theorem because it was a theorem about “reality” not about Theory and Experiment which are the meat and potatoes of “real physics”. Bell's Theorem was generally dismissed by everyone as “mere philosophy”. When my friend, physicist Heinz Pagels, showed me BT, published in an obscure new journal, I was fascinated and decided that Bell must be wrong. In my efforts to disprove him I managed to come up with the world's shortest proof of Bell's Theorem. My efforts in this direction also put me in touch with the other 5 people who cared about BT including physicist John Clauser whose efforts in doing and encouraging others to experiments inspired by BT led eventually to his receiving the 2002 Nobel Physics Prize along with Zeilinger and Aspect. By that time the number of people who cared about Bell's Theorem had immensely increased. Much of this story is related in David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics.

JW: Did you begin to experiment with mind altering substances during the 1960s? Did you see anything in this?

NH:  I first took acid in 1962 while a physics graduate student at Stanford. I was impressed with the sheer number of different states of consciousness I could intensely access without dying. Also that experience convinced me that consciousness was a much more fundamental mystery than physics and that conviction shaped the rest of my life. LSD was for me a gateway drug to several other mind-altering substances such as marijuana.

JW: How can we determine what Quantum Reality is?

NH: Quantum Reality is the ability to tell a plausible story about what is really happening in the world consistent with the highly accurate quantum mathematical formalism.

Quantum theory seems to describe the world in two different ways: a wave of possibility until it's measured and a particle when it's measured. The biggest problem in quantum physics is what is a measurement? What does it take to “collapse the wave function”?

Not all interactions achieve a collapse. A beam of light can bounce off mirrors, be divided in two by beam splitters, pass through a lens consisting of zillions of atoms and still remain a wave of possibility. But when it hits the back of your eye, it acts like a particle (photon). Lots of people have tried to investigate what it takes to make a measurement but so far no one has quite succeeded. Anyone who can solve “the measurement problem” will take a big step towards describing quantum reality.

JW: How did you feel about experimentation during the 1960's as far as opening the doors of consciousness?

NH: Ever eloquent Terence McKenna said it best: “Now even bad people can see God.”

For me these substances inspired a search for what I call quantum tantra, an intimate new connection with Nature accomplished not by chemistry but by (quantum) physics. 

This search inspired 50 years of poetry about what that connection might feel like but (so far) no hint of how to accomplish such a marvelous new union. Many of these poems have been published on my quantum tantra blog (under the “quantum tantra” tag). The two closest approximations to this vision might be “Opening Night” and “Elements of Tantra”  Much of my blog is focused on this search for a new way to connect with Nature.

JW: Are there any prominent figures that you met during the 60s and maybe 70s that you felt you learned something from?

NH:  I will stretch out that time span a bit to fit in a few people who were especially important in my life. Meeting and working with physicist John Clauser, who was certainly the most important moving force in exploring Bell's Theorem. Then meeting Greek-American physicist Demetrios Kalamadis who proposed a very clever faster-than-light signaling scheme that took a team of us months to refute was a very exciting time in my life.

I first met Sasha and Ann Shulgin at one of Bob Wilson's salons in Santa Cruz and subsequently attended many of their parties in Lafayette with my partner August O'Connor. Pihkal and Tihkal are certainly landmark books in any psychedelic library.

But as far as those who are exploring a really exciting edge, I would cite my friendship with Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston, who has made a career of studying the Impossible: events both in the past and present that violate our sense of what can physically happen. Kripal (“Mutants and Mystics”) is interested in SuperNature, what we might call miracles. The best example of such impossibilities is the behavior of Saint Joseph of Copertino whose life is chronicled in detail by Michael Grosso in The Man Who Could Fly and other works. How impossible is this? A man who could consistently levitate over a period of 35 years.

Coincidentally, near the end of his life Joseph the gravity defier lived in a monastery not more than 100 miles from Galileo who was busy formulating the physics of gravity. Both men had been examined by the Inquisition, Galileo sentenced to house arrest and Joseph sent to obscure monasteries where his impossible antics would not attract public attention.

JW: Has your book  Quantum Reality become outdated?

NH: I think QR is still an accessible introduction to quantum theory and to the big problem of fashioning a quantum reality which gives us some story we can tell our kids about “what is really happening in the quantum world “, some sort of picture about what is really going on behind the mathematics.

Forty years since the publication of QR the quantum reality question remains conspicuously unsolved but there has been some progress.

First of all John Clauser and two of his colleagues received the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022 for their experimental work on Bell's Theorem.

Then there were a few more attempts (besides the eight I listed in QR) to solve the measurement problem (how quantum possibility turns into actuality) most notably the works of  Wojciech Zurek at Los Alamos and Oxford's Roger Penrose.

Zurek has carried out a long and ambitious study of realistic models of wave functions losing their coherence when interacting with complex environments. However, even though these scrambled waves can no longer interfere, they still remain mere possibilities and never collapse into actualities.

Penrose has speculated that Gravity collapses the wavefunction, that when a quantum system gets big enough it essentially collapses “under its own weight” but so far there exists no experimental evidence for this conjecture.

On a lighter tone, on the last page of Quantum Reality, I append a song “Bell's Theorem Blues”. Not so long ago I persuaded a local jazz group to perform BTB and it became part of a celebration in Belfast, Ireland (Bell's birthplace) to honor the fiftieth anniversary of his creation of this now famous theorem. Since Belfast has a law against naming streets after people they named a street after his theorem, probably the only street in the world so named. 

Yes, I believe that Quantum Reality is still a valuable introduction to quantum theory and to the difficulties we still face in trying to describe exactly what is going on in even the simplest of quantum measurements.