History of my discovery of signal nonlocality

Memorandum for the Record

I first got the idea that Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement could be used for communication back in 1961 at Brandeis University and discussed it with Sylvan Schweber and other faculty at Brandeis. I got the idea from reading David Inglis in Reviews of Modern Physics.


I did not properly realize the contradiction with orthodox quantum theory (passion at a distance - unitarity ----> signal locality) until ~ 1995 reading p. 30 of Bohm & Hiley's Undivided Universe . There they say that the Born probability rule is a test particle approximation violating the action-reaction type principle i.e. action of quantum potential Q on the hidden variable beable with no direct "back-action" of the beable on its piloting Q. This back action corresponds to Antony Valentini's much later "sub-quantal non-equilibrium. I gave two papers on this published as abstracts at two of the Hameroff Tucson meetings 1996 & I think 1998? i.e. II & III

"The same theme was taken up during the most fiery panel of the conference — the concurrent session on consciousness and physical reality — which began with an eloquent plea for a renewed materialism, ‘realistic monism’ from Galen Strawson (leading to an all-too-brief exchange with John Searle). This led naturally to Stuart Hameroff’s linking of pan-experiential philosophy with fundamental spacetime geometry. After M. Hirafuji’s paper on DNA quantum effects and astrophysicist S. Malin’s coupling of Whitehead and quantum mechanics, proponents of various quantum creeds all sharpened their knives for the final confrontation with the inimitable Jack Sarfatti. Presenting a Bohmian take on the Penrose-Hameroff microtubule model, Sarfatti was asked whether configuration space (in which qualia and consciousness occur in his version) actually existed in a real physical sense. This generated a lot of heat (and decibels) which spilled over to furious post-conference exchanges on the Internet and major features in PC World and MSNBC on quantum computation and consciousness. The spirit of Tucson II, for better or worse, was most evident in this session."
Keith Sutherland

I called Q* the sub-quantal non-equilibrium post-quantum generalization of Bohm's sub-quantal equilibrium Q.

Q has signal locality "passion at a distance" (A. Shimony)

Q* has signal non-locality violating the no-cloning theorem.

QUANTUM-D: What is back-reaction?
Feb 19, 1996 ... Normally in quantum mechanics this "back-action" is not taken into account..... More detail about Jack Sarfatti's ideas can be found at: ...
www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/rhett.html - Cached - Similar

I associated "signal nonlocality" as the necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the generation of inner conscious qualia at the 1996 Tucson meeting.