Jack Sarfatti

Education

Sarfatti was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Hyman and Millie Sarfatti. His father was born in Kastoria, Greece, and moved to New York as a child with his family.

Sarfatti attended Midwood High School in Midwood, Brooklyn, graduating in 1956. In Destiny Matrix (2002), Sarfatti wrote that, when he was 13, he received at least one telephone call from a voice that said it was a conscious computer on a spaceship. The voice said he had been identified as "one of 400 bright young receptive minds," and that he would be picked up shortly from his building's fire escape. He and several friends waited, he wrote, but nothing happened.

In 1960 he obtained his BA in physics from Cornell University, and in 1963 published his first paper, "Quantum-Mechanical Correlation Theory of Electromagnetic Fields," in Nuovo Cimento, the journal of the Italian Physical Society. He obtained his MS in physics in 1967 from the University of California, San Diego, and his PhD in 1969 from the University of California, Riverside—where he studied under Fred Cummings—for a thesis entitled "Gauge Invariance in the Theory of Superfluidity." He and Cummings co-wrote a paper, "Beyond the Hartree-Fock Theory in Superfluid Helium," published in Physica Scripta in 1970.

Academic career

From 1967 to 1971 Sarfatti worked as assistant professor of physics at San Diego State University, and in 1971–1972 held a research fellowship at Birkbeck College, London, where he worked with David Bohm. He also studied at the Cornell Space Science Centre, the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, and the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich. In 1973–1974 he conducted research into mini black holes at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. At around this time he decided to leave academia, seeing it as too sterile. Sarfatti's politics, as noted by Kaiser, leans to the right and he opposes the left progressive "cultural Marxism" of the majority of professors in American Universities who he considers as "The Enemy Within." Indeed, Sarfatti's work with Lawry Chickering at the neoconservative Reagan think tank Institute for Contemporary Studies in the 1980s is mentioned by Kaiser. Sarfatti is close friends for over forty years with conservative talk show host Michael Savage.

Fundamental Fysiks Group

Sarfatti became a leading member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, an informal group of physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the 1970s. The group—"very smart and very playful," according to David Kaiser—was founded by Elizabeth Rauscher and included Henry Stapp, Fred Alan Wolf, Nick Herbert, Fritjof Capra, John Clauser, Philippe Eberhard, Saul-Paul Sirag and George Weissman.

Several held academic posts, but others had been left unemployed when the post-war boom in physics ended in 1968–1972. Physics, too, had changed; students were taught little or no philosophy and metaphysics. The Fundamental Fysiks Group, with PhDs in theoretical physics, made names for themselves writing about consciousness, metaphysics and quantum mysticism.

Quantum theory—particularly Bell's theorem and the concept of quantum entanglement—had raised questions about parapsychology and telepathy. Kaiser argues that Sarfatti and the group kept several of these apparently fringe ideas alive. For example, they believed they could develop faster-than-light communication, discussions that led to the no-cloning theorem, which became part of quantum cryptography. The group similarly kept Bell's theorem alive, which eventually led to quantum information science. According to historian Robert P. Crease and physicist Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, apart from one brief mention in 1966, Bell's theorem "did not enter mainstream physics textbooks until after the Fundamental Fysiks Group had left its impact."

Kaiser writes that there was significant government interest in telepathy and remote viewing. The Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency set up a program called ESPionage, financing research conducted by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where Sarfatti and the Fundamental Fysiks Group became what Kaiser calls its "house theorists." The group became celebrities in San Francisco. City of San Francisco Magazine devoted two pages to them in 1975, shortly after the magazine was acquired by the film director Francis Ford Coppola. The spread included a photograph of Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Fred Alan Wolf and Nick Herbert, and discussed them "going into trances, working at telepathy, [and] dipping into their subconscious in experiments toward psychic mobility." In 1979 Sarfatti was featured on the cover of North Beach Magazine.

Research into Uri Geller

In 1974 Sarfatti and the Fundamental Fysiks Group were hired by the Stanford Research Institute to help with its research into Uri Geller. Geller, an Israeli, maintained that he could bend spoons and control watches using only his thoughts. The SRI studies, led by laser physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, began in November 1972 and resulted in a paper in Nature in October 1974. According to Kaiser, SRI asked Sarfatti and the group to use quantum theory, and specifically Bell's theorem, to explain what Geller appeared to be doing. Joseph Hanlon wrote in New Scientist at the time that the SRI tests had been conducted in a "circus atmosphere," with Geller in control.

Sarfatti and Fred Wolf helped to organize a series of tests at Birkbeck College, London, led by John Hasted. On June 21 and 22, 1974, Hasted and Sarfatti joined David Bohm, Arthur Koestler, Arthur C. Clarke, and two of Geller's associates, Ted Bastin and Brendan O'Regan, to watch Geller appear to bend four brass Yale keys and a 1 cm disk, affect a Geiger counter and deflect a compass needle. Hanlon wrote that any good magician could have bent the keys, no matter how closely the observers believed they were watching. Sarfatti issued press releases saying he believed Geller had demonstrated psychokinetic ability, statements picked up by Science News and the international media. Hasted, Bohm, Bastin and O'Regan described the experiments in Nature in April 1975. Sarfatti retracted his view in December that year after watching magician James Randi perform the same trick.

Physics–Consciousness Research Group

Outside government, groups within the human potential movement were also interested in quantum theory. Werner Erhard, founder of Erhard Seminars Training (EST), moved to the Bay Area and came into contact with Sarfatti and Fred Alan Wolf. In January 1975 Erhard and the physicists formally set up a non-profit think tank, the Physics–Consciousness Research Group, with Sarfatti as president and Saul-Paul Sirag vice-president. Funded by Erhard, they held lectures, published pamphlets, and staged an opera in a Bay Area park about quantum physics and the brain.

Erhard introduced Sarfatti to Michael Murphy of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. In January 1976 Sarfatti and the Physics–Consciousness Research Group gathered there for a month-long conference on physics and consciousness. Sarfatti was the conference's intellectual director, and wrote to major figures asking them to address it. Gary Zukav's best-selling The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) was organized around his attendance at this conference; he and Sarfatti were roommates in North Beach at the time. The conference apart, the Esalen group held regular workshops on quantum theory, with physicists mixing lectures with yoga and sessions in the hot tubs.

Exactly when and why Leary began to formulate SMI2LE is unclear. Jack Sarfatti, a physicist who started the Physics/ Consciousness Research Group in Berkeley, claimed that Leary’s inspiration came from an unexpected source: General Douglas MacArthur. Leary, Sarfatti said, was really MacArthur’s “lovechild.” The general-to-be often danced "with Leary’s mother when Leary was in utero, and Leary’s father was an army dentist who supposedly had MacArthur as a patient. 38 And MacArthur, Sarfatti pointed out, made some astonishing prototranshumanist predictions near the end of his life. Tomorrow’s cadets, the retired general told West Pointers in 1962, would experience humanity’s “staggering evolution” as people harnessed “cosmic energy” and created “disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years” and “space ships to the moon.” All this was preparation for, MacArthur mused, some final apocalyptic conflict with “the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy.” 39 By Sarfatti’s tortuous reasoning, Leary’s parents knew MacArthur, Leary had (briefly) attended West Point, and MacArthur spoke about some prototranshumanist ideas, thus sparking Leary’s imagination—QED. ... "Besides Leary and Wilson, the workshop featured longevity researchers and advocates from the Bay Area Cryonics Society. Jack Sarfatti and a few other underemployed physicists, intrigued by Leary’s confluence of mysticism, space travel, and quantum theories, joined the two-day seminar and supplied their own riffs on Leary’s radical technological enthusiasm. Leary continued his association with Sarfatti, and together they attended workshops at the Esalen Institute (“ a Cape Canaveral of inner space”), nestled amid Big Sur’s rugged beauty. ..."Leary gave a fuller exposition of SMI2LE in Exo-psychology, a book he dedicated to “evolutionary agents, on this planet and elsewhere.” 51 Leary mutated his own definition of exo-psychology throughout the book. It was a “Science which Studies the Evolution of the Nervous System in its Larval and post-terrestrial Phases,” the “psychology of physics” (Psi Phy), as well as a “theory of Interstellar Neurogenetics.” Juxtaposing his ideas with “pre-Einsteinian psychology,” Leary claimed that astronautics, astrophysics, genetics, and nuclear science were all research areas with “significance for human destiny in the future.” 52 The book goes on to describe the “eight circuits” of the human nervous system and the “twenty-four stages of Neural Evolution,” which Leary likened to the periodic table. Resembling better-known books, such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, Exo-Psychology cited the quantum musings of physicists like Jack Sarfatti and John A. Wheeler while criticizing the cynicism of Werner Erhard’s est and “puritanical protestant-ethic manipulators” like B. F. Skinner. 53 Overall, Exo-Psychology blended a freewheeling pastiche of ideas from quantum physics and genetics with Vedic, Islamic, and Zen philosophies. Neuropolitics and Exo-Psychology were clear signs that Leary had strayed far from O’Neill’s comparatively straightforward ideas, which were grounded in optimistic yet measured extrapolations of 1970s technology.

Epistemological Letters

The new ideas were not invariably welcome within mainstream academic physics. According to Kaiser, Samuel Goudsmit, editor of the prestigious Physical Review, formally banned discussion of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, drawing up special instructions to referees to reject material that even hinted at the philosophical debate. The new material was distributed instead in alternative media. One such publication was a hand-typed newsletter called Epistemological Letters, published by a Swiss Foundation. Several eminent physicists and philosophers published their material there—including the Irish physicist John Bell, the originator of Bell's theorem—as well as Sarfatti and other members of the Physics-Consciousness Research Group.

Unicorn Preprint Service

Sarfatti and Fred Wolf helped set up the Unicorn Preprint Service, which was financed by Ira Einhorn, an American anti-war and environmental activist. Unicorn distributed articles not published elsewhere. Its list included eminent scholars such as Thomas Kuhn and Gerald Feinberg, though recipients might have had their names added without being asked. The list ended in 1979 when Einhorn was charged with the murder of a former girlfriend.

Space, Time and Beyond

Einhorn arranged for the publication of Space-Time and Beyond: Toward an Explanation of the Unexplainable (1974). The book listed Bob Toben, a school friend of Fred Wolf's, as author, but the physics had been written by Wolf and Sarfatti. It sold 50,000 copies in its first edition, and was translated into German and Japanese. Offering what Kaiser called a "hip, New Age guide for the perplexed," it was one of the first of a wave of popular books attempting to explain the "new physics."

Faster-than-light communication system

In May 1978 Sarfatti filed for a patent for a "faster-than-light quantum communication system," which would be able, he said, to transmit a human voice instantly across vast distances without any possibility of eavesdropping. That there could be no eavesdropping is now a feature of quantum cryptography, which did not exist in 1978; however, like Nick Herbert's FLASH (discussed by Kaiser) that led to the no-cloning theorem, Sarfatti's design did not work because it depended on orthodox quantum theory whose linearity and Born probability rule assumptions forbid such communication between different subsystems of an entangled system. Sarfatti's research in this field has continued and is summarized by John Walker. Sarfatti has introduced a new concept "back activity" nonlinear non-unitary "post-quantum physics," which is to quantum theory as general relativity is to special relativity. Using the work of David Bohm on pilot wave theory (1952) as extended by Yakir Aharonov and most recently by R. I. Sutherland. Sarfatti no longer uses the word "superluminal" which contradicts at least the spirit of Einstein's relativity if not the letter. It has been shown by Huw Price et al, that retrocausal future causes of present effects explains what appears to be superluminal entanglement completely consistent with relativity. The post-quantum back-reaction of Bohm's "hidden variable" (aka "be able" J.S. Bell) on its pilot wave enables effective communication between parts of an entangled whole in violation of the no-signaling theorems of orthodox quantum theory. Post-quantum theory has been shown by Antony Valentini to permit hyper-computation in which P = NP.

Connections with Intelligence Community

Sarfatti's friendship with Lawry Chickering who was director of the Reagan think tank Institute of Contemporary Studies in San Francisco is documented in Kaiser's book. One also finds "Jack Sarfatti, a theoretical physicist who was a student of Hans Bethe and who worked with several scientists of that generation, reviewed the documents. Sarfatti found that the first four answers offered nothing that might have been considered secret or strategic. However, according to Sarfatti, beginning with question 5 the interview contains important information. In particular, referring to questions 11 - 13 and 15 - 19, Sarfatti believes the information transmitted was privileged, derived from Bohr's contacts with his American colleagues, and would have significantly speeded up the Soviet bomb program." These claims that Bohr revealed secrets to Terletsky have been refuted.

Caffe Trieste

Sarfatti's local celebrity in San Francisco continued throughout the 1980s with seminars on physics and consciousness in the Caffe Trieste on Vallejo Street, North Beach. In 1993 the novelist Herbert Gold called the café "Sarfatti's Cave," after Plato's cave:

Sarfatti's Cave is the name I'll give to the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco, where Jack Sarfatti, Ph.D. in physics, writes his poetry, evokes his mystical, miracle-working ancestors, and has conducted a several-decade-long seminar on the nature of reality and his own love life to a rapt succession of espresso scholars. He sings Gilbert and Sullivan songs. He suffers tragic reverses among women. He issues ultimatums to the CIA, the FBI, Werner Erhard, the navy, the KGB, and the Esalen Institute. With ample charm and boyish smiles he issues nonnegotiable demands. He has access to a photocopying machine. It's Jack Sarfatti against the world, and he is indomitable.

Conferences, Stardrive

Sarfatti continued to attend academic meetings. In February 1986 he argued during a meeting at the New York Academy of Sciences that faster-than-light communication was possible using time loops, and said he had tried to persuade the Defense Department to fund the research. In 1995 he set up the Internet Science Education Project, with a website, Stardrive, and in the same year he and his brother Michael set up websites for charities in San Francisco, such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Hebrew Academy.

In 1999 Sarfatti was appointed by the International Space Sciences Organization, a group set up by Joe Firmage, the Internet entrepreneur, to explore mind-matter issues. Between 2002 and 2005 he self-published three books, Destiny Matrix (2002), Space-Time and Beyond II (2002), and Super Cosmos: Through Struggles to the Stars (2005).

Sarfatti was one of three physicists whose invitations to a conference on de Broglie-Bohm theory—organized in 2010 by Mike Towler of the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory—were withdrawn. Antony Valentini, another organizer, withdrew invitations from Sarfatti; F. David Peat, David Bohm's biographer; and Brian Josephson, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics. According to Times Higher Education (THE), Peat's invitation was withdrawn because he had written about Jungian synchronicity and Josephson's because of his interest in parapsychology. Peat's and Josephson's invitations were restored; THE did not explain why Sarfatti was uninvited.

The former Minister of Interior of Italy, Enzo Bianco, invited Sarfatti to Catania, Sicily in 2014 where he gave a lecture to a packed audience. He also gave a talk at the Savile Club in London in 2015 both can be seen on his Youtube channel.

Sarfatti has attended two workshops of the AAAS on quantum retrocausality in 2006 and 2011 at the University of San Diego directed by Professor Daniel Sheehan of the physics department there. He is scheduled to give a talk there at the third workshop June 15–16, 2016 on "Bohm Pilot Wave Post-Quantum Theory" [3]. The video of this talk is here

and on June 27, 2017 he gave a video talk on "The Post-Quantum Mechanics of Conscious AI" at the Quantum Gravity Research Organization in Los Angeles.

100 Year Starship study

In 2010 Sarfatti was among 30 people invited to join a working group, the 100-Year Starship study, financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA's Ames Research Center, to discuss how interstellar space flight might be achieved. Sarfatti was invited by Creon Levit of NASA, who told the BBC that Sarfatti is able to discuss unusual ideas without worrying about the effect on his career: "Although his interests and style are outside of the mainstream, he is a fully pedigreed physicist and he knows as much or more than mainstream physicists. When he talks about warp drives, he knows what he's talking about. He knows he's speculating."

Selected worksBooks

Toben, Bob (1975). Space-Time and Beyond: Toward an Explanation of the Unexplainable. E.P. Dutton (Toben in conversation with Fred Alan Wolf and Jack Sarfatti). ISBN 978-0-525-47399-2

(2005). Super Cosmos: Through Struggles to the Stars. AuthorHouse. ISBN 978-1-4184-7662-5

(2002). Space-Time and Beyond II. AuthorHouse. ISBN 978-1-4033-9022-6

(2002). Destiny Matrix. AuthorHouse. ISBN 978-0-7596-9689-1

Papers

(2017) "Progress in Post-Quantum Mechanics" AIP Conference Proceedings, 1841, 040003