Nick Herbert | |
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| Born | September 7, 1936 |
| Alma mater | Saint Charles Preparatory School, Ohio State University, Stanford University |
| Spouse | Betsy Rose Rasumny (deceased 2002) |
Nick Herbert (born September 7, 1936) is an American physicist and author, best known for his book Quantum Reality .
Herbert studied engineering physics at The Ohio State University, graduating in 1959. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1967 for work on nuclear scattering experiments. After a one-year teaching job at Monmouth College in Illinois, Herbert held a number of posts in industry. The most illustrious of these was senior physicist at Memorex Corporation in Santa Clara, California, where he developed new magnetic materials, as well as magnetic, electrostatic and optical measuring devices, and carried out theoretical work on Lorentz microscopy. He was also senior physicist at Smith-Corona Marchant Corporation in Palo Alto, California where he developed a new theory of xerographic process and worked on early developments in ink jet printing. [1] [2]
While employed in industry, Herbert was part of the Fundamental Fysiks Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, founded in May 1975 by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann. [3] The group's initial interest was in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the EPR paradox, and Bell's inequality, and members pursued also diverse interests that lay outside of mainstream physics, exploring psychedelic drugs, psi phenomena, the nature of consciousness, and speculative connections of these areas with quantum physics. During the 1970s and 1980s, Herbert and Saul-Paul Sirag organized a yearly Esalen Seminar on the Nature of Reality, bringing together participants to discuss the interpretation of quantum mechanics. [4] With Richard Shoup of Xerox PARC, Herbert constructed a "Metaphase Typewriter", a "quantum operated" device whose purpose was "to communicate with disembodied spirits". [1] Despite many tests, including an attempt to contact the spirit of Harry Houdini on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the group reported no success with the device. [5]
Herbert supports a holistic interpretation of quantum physics. [6] He has argued for "quantum animism" in which mind permeates the world at every level. [7] Werner Krieglstein wrote regarding his quantum animism:
Herbert's quantum animism differs from traditional animism in that it avoids assuming a dualistic model of mind and matter. Traditional dualism assumes that some kind of spirit inhabits a body and makes it move, a ghost in the machine. Herbert's quantum animism presents the idea that every natural system has an inner life, a conscious center, from which it directs and observes its action. [8]
In 1981, Herbert proposed FLASH, a scheme for sending signals faster than the speed of light using quantum entanglement. [9] Of this proposal, quantum computing pioneer Asher Peres wrote, "I was the referee who approved the publication of Nick Herbert’s FLASH paper, knowing perfectly well that it was wrong. I explain why my decision was the correct one, and I briefly review the progress to which it led." [10] Chief among the results that Peres claimed stemmed from a refutation of Herbert's proposal was the no-cloning theorem, proved by Wootters, Zurek, and Dieks. [11]
The Copenhagen interpretation is a collection of views about the meaning of quantum mechanics, stemming from the work of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others. The term "Copenhagen interpretation" was apparently coined by Heisenberg during the 1950s to refer to ideas developed in the 1925–1927 period, glossing over his disagreements with Bohr. Consequently, there is no definitive historical statement of what the interpretation entails.
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is a philosophical position about how the mathematics used in quantum mechanics relates to physical reality. It asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in some "world" or universe. In contrast to some other interpretations, the evolution of reality as a whole in MWI is rigidly deterministic and local. Many-worlds is also called the relative state formulation or the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957. Bryce DeWitt popularized the formulation and named it many-worlds in the 1970s.
In physics, the no-cloning theorem states that it is impossible to create an independent and identical copy of an arbitrary unknown quantum state, a statement which has profound implications in the field of quantum computing among others. The theorem is an evolution of the 1970 no-go theorem authored by James Park, in which he demonstrates that a non-disturbing measurement scheme which is both simple and perfect cannot exist. The aforementioned theorems do not preclude the state of one system becoming entangled with the state of another as cloning specifically refers to the creation of a separable state with identical factors. For example, one might use the controlled NOT gate and the Walsh–Hadamard gate to entangle two qubits without violating the no-cloning theorem as no well-defined state may be defined in terms of a subsystem of an entangled state. The no-cloning theorem concerns only pure states whereas the generalized statement regarding mixed states is known as the no-broadcast theorem.
Superluminal communication is a hypothetical process in which information is conveyed at faster-than-light speeds. The current scientific consensus is that faster-than-light communication is not possible, and to date it has not been achieved in any experiment.
Bell's theorem is a term encompassing a number of closely related results in physics, all of which determine that quantum mechanics is incompatible with local hidden-variable theories, given some basic assumptions about the nature of measurement. "Local" here refers to the principle of locality, the idea that a particle can only be influenced by its immediate surroundings, and that interactions mediated by physical fields cannot propagate faster than the speed of light. "Hidden variables" are putative properties of quantum particles that are not included in quantum theory but nevertheless affect the outcome of experiments. In the words of physicist John Stewart Bell, for whom this family of results is named, "If [a hidden-variable theory] is local it will not agree with quantum mechanics, and if it agrees with quantum mechanics it will not be local."
Fred Alan Wolf is an American theoretical physicist specializing in quantum physics and the relationship between physics and consciousness. He is a former physics professor at San Diego State University, and has helped to popularize science on the Discovery Channel. He is the author of a number of physics-themed books including Taking the Quantum Leap (1981), The Dreaming Universe (1994), Mind into Matter (2000), and Time Loops and Space Twists (2011).
Asher Peres was an Israeli physicist. He is well known for his work relating quantum mechanics and information theory. He helped to develop the Peres–Horodecki criterion for quantum entanglement, as well as the concept of quantum teleportation, and collaborated with others on quantum information and special relativity. He also introduced the Peres metric and researched the Hamilton–Jacobi–Einstein equation in general relativity. With Mario Feingold, he published work in quantum chaos that is known to mathematicians as the Feingold–Peres conjecture and to physicists as the Feingold–Peres theory.
Jack Sarfatti is an American theoretical physicist. Working largely outside academia, most of Sarfatti's publications revolve around quantum physics and consciousness.
William "Bill" Kent Wootters is an American theoretical physicist, and one of the founders of the field of quantum information theory. In a 1982 joint paper with Wojciech H. Zurek, Wootters proved the no cloning theorem, at the same time as Dennis Dieks, and independently of James L. Park who had formulated the no-cloning theorem in 1970. He is known for his contributions to the theory of quantum entanglement including quantitative measures of it, entanglement-assisted communication and entanglement distillation. The term qubit, denoting the basic unit of quantum information, originated in a conversation between Wootters and Benjamin Schumacher in 1992.
Quantum mysticism, sometimes referred pejoratively to as quantum quackery or quantum woo, is a set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, spirituality, or mystical worldviews to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered pseudoscience and quackery by quantum mechanics experts.
David I. Kaiser is an American physicist and historian of science. He is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a full professor in MIT's department of physics. He also served as an inaugural associate dean for MIT's cross-disciplinary program in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.
The Fundamental Fysiks Group was founded in San Francisco in May 1975 by two physicists, Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, at the time both graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The group held informal discussions on Friday afternoons to explore the philosophical implications of quantum theory. Leading members included Fritjof Capra, John Clauser, Philippe Eberhard, Nick Herbert, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Henry Stapp, and Fred Alan Wolf.
Elizabeth A. Rauscher (1937–2019) was an American physicist and parapsychologist. She was born in Berkeley, California on March 18, 1937. She died on July 3, 2019.
The Pusey–Barrett–Rudolph (PBR) theorem is a no-go theorem in quantum foundations due to Matthew Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph in 2012. It has particular significance for how one may interpret the nature of the quantum state.
Epistemological Letters was a hand-typed, mimeographed "underground" newsletter about quantum physics that was distributed to a private mailing list, described by the physicist and Nobel laureate John Clauser as a "quantum subculture", between 1973 and 1984.
The von Neumann–Wigner interpretation, also described as "consciousness causes collapse", is an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which consciousness is postulated to be necessary for the completion of the process of quantum measurement.
Quantum Reality is a 1985 popular science book by physicist Nick Herbert, a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group which was formed to explore the philosophical implications of quantum theory. The book attempts to address the ontology of quantum objects, their attributes, and their interactions, without reliance on advanced mathematical concepts. Herbert discusses the most common interpretations of quantum mechanics and their consequences in turn, highlighting the conceptual advantages and drawbacks of each.
Quantum foundations is a discipline of science that seeks to understand the most counter-intuitive aspects of quantum theory, reformulate it and even propose new generalizations thereof. Contrary to other physical theories, such as general relativity, the defining axioms of quantum theory are quite ad hoc, with no obvious physical intuition. While they lead to the right experimental predictions, they do not come with a mental picture of the world where they fit.
Adrian Kent is a British theoretical physicist, Professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Cambridge, member of the Centre for Quantum Information and Foundations, and Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research areas are the foundations of quantum theory, quantum information science and quantum cryptography. He is known as the inventor of relativistic quantum cryptography. In 1999 he published the first unconditionally secure protocols for bit commitment and coin tossing, which were also the first relativistic cryptographic protocols. He is a co-inventor of quantum tagging, or quantum position authentication, providing the first schemes for position-based quantum cryptography. In 2005 he published with Lucien Hardy and Jonathan Barrett the first security proof of quantum key distribution based on the no-signalling principle.
Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods is a 1993 quantum physics textbook by Israeli physicist Asher Peres. Well-regarded among the physics community, it is known for unconventional choices of topics to include.
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