"Who ordered that?"

You found it great! That confirms I was not imagining it!
It looks like I substituted "Brian Josephson" for "Alan Aspect" in my memory.
Is Josephson mentioned in the book? Aspect did visit me in North Beach
with Lawry Chickering who was running the Reagan think tank ICS
set up by Cap Weinberger and Ed Meese. We had a party for Aspect with
Chickering at Jagdish's on Lombard St near Coit Tower.
This is the time of the Chickering letter to Under Secty of Defense
Richard De Lauer that I wrote with Lawry that Mermin (Physics Today), Gell-Mann (Quark and Jaguar) and
Jeremy Bernstein (New Yorker) all wrote about. This was when we were participating in the formulation
of the SDI strategy with Marshall Naify and Chickering. The story is in Destiny Matrix.

Just in time to put into my book Super Cosmos.
I did not know David Finkelstein was in it also?
That means Schmidt must have read "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" or
maybe he was an est person?
As I say Kim Burrafato and I only looked at it a few seconds back in ~ 1981
in a book store on our exercise routine out to the Marina Green by the
Golden Gate Bridge. What Arthur Koestler called a "Library Angel".
I never read the book, nor do I own it. Please write a review of it
for my book Super Cosmos.

On Feb 5, 2004, at 6:05 PM, Tony Smith wrote:

"Jack, here are some extracts from Satori by Schmidt (1981).
The setting is that the Bishop is interrogating an individual
named Dunn on a spaceship near a planet far from Earth.

The excerpts clearly show you as an advancer of knowledge,
but
it seems to me (maybe I am misreading, but I think that my
quotes are pretty much in accurate context) that the quotes
of statments by the Bishop about Heisenberg, Bohm, and Finkelstein
are approving statements by the authoritarian Bishop,
which would imply that they were considered to be on the side
of repression rather than free research.
For example,
the Bishop said that they were 'against the iron rule of reason."

Bohm too. Uh Oh! I better read that book. How did you get it? Online?

"Heisenberg stayed in Nazi Germany, so I can see the author, Schmidt,
having that opinion of him for political reasons,
and also perhaps because Schmidt might have thought of
Heisenberg's late efforts at a unified field theory as
efforts a la Einstein to replace quantum probability
with a classical-type field theory - do you recall any such thing?"

I knew Heisenberg slightly. I met him with Feynman at Cal Tech and I
stayed at his Institute in Munich in July 1966 at a NATO institute
with John Wheeler and Martin Kruskal. This was before I went to
UKAERE Harwell to write the paper with Marshall Stoneham
on spontaneous broken symmetry Goldstone - Jahn Teller Effect
in Proc Phys Soc London. Heisenberg had a Landau-Ginzburg sort of
Dirac eq as I dimly recall.

"Maybe the author Schmidt thought of Bohm as trying to bring
classical order instead of probablilistic uncertainty to physics
(note that would NOT apply to your post-Bohm quantum theory
with back-reaction)."

I had no idea of back-action in 1981. I did not get that idea until
1994 reading Bohm and Hiley p. 30 of "The Undivided Universe"
in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books" at Opera Plaza in
San Francisco. I had a girlfriend who owned a successful computer company
who lived there. She had been quite a well known mathematician
before becoming an entrepreneur.

"Do you have any idea why the author Schmidt might have
put Finkelstein on the side of repression?"

You tell me. You were his student. I invited David to Esalen in 1976.
I first met him with Lenny Susskind at Yeshiva University and he (David)
was trying to look like BaBa Ram Dass, so I figured he would be perfect
for Esalen and fit right in, which he did. David then organized the
Big Shot Werner Erhard Physics meetings with Stephen Hawking,
Sidney Coleman, Feynman, ... Lenny Susskind mentions that on
edge.org.

"Here are the excerpts:

"... [Bishop:] "The establishment of the Power saved the Earth from
destruction by the forces of regression."
...
[Dunn:] "Bullshit. The Power IS the force of regression."

[Bishop:] "The Power is all the knowledge mankind has gathered
in its lifetime, used wisely and carefully for betterment."

[Dunn:] ... "... The Power controls knowledge, keeps it under
lock and key. It's stopped the gathering of any new knowledge
and totally destroyed the scientific effort ...
It lives off the wisdom of the past, has a stranglehold on
the present, and by killing science, it kills the future."
...
[Bishop:] ... "... We have enough knowledge ... the Power
protects us from ourselves. It gives the people that part
of the knowledge they need to make their lives better."
...
[Dunn:]... "... What if further research would uncover
a new theory, one that might make vast areas of current
theory obsolete? ..."

[Bishop:] "Impossible ... Unthinkable. Such a thing cannot happen."
...
[Dunn:] ... "... Do you realize ... that if Sarfatti and Aspect
had blindly accepted Einstein's dictum that the speed of light
was the limiting velocity in the universe,
they never would have conceived or proven superluminal connectedness,
and we wouldn't even be here?
Tachyons never turned up, spinning black holes gave random
destinations with no way back,and sub-light velocities
simiply took too long.
Only the Sarfatti-Aspect effect gave us the key to the stars."

The sub-title of my "Super Cosmos" is "Through Struggles to the Stars" (RAF motto)
...
"the Power owns and controls science now.
But it's a dead, useless thing you own. ...
Only freedom can revive it."
...
[Bishop:] ... "... what was ... this vaunted science you cherish
so much, based on? Human reason! ... As if the conscious, rational
mind was the major driving force in human history! ...
... Even within science itself there was a protest against
the iron rule of reason.
Quantum theory punched the standard view of reality full of holes.
Men of foresight and wisdom like Heisenberg, Bohm, and Finkelstein
tried to make their comrades see the error of their ways.
But it was too late ... Ruin came down on all alike ...

Tony, it looks like Schmidt puts David with us Good Guys? Why did you write:

"Do you have any idea why the author Schmidt might have
put Finkelstein on the side of repression?"

... If the Power had not come along when it did ... the destruction
would have been complete. ... The Power ... is the simple faith
the people have in us that provides the strength we need
to control science and transform it ... into the gentle and
beneficent Knowledge.
It is the faith mankind gives us that allows us to give them
peace and security and happiness in return. ...".


Wow! I had never read that far. Obviously the "Power" was Werner Erhard a kind of American Demagogue Cult Leader now almost forgotten
http://qedcorp.com/book/psi/hitweapon.html
and
David Finkelstein's name appeared in SF Chronicle about those est physics meetings. Or maybe Schmidt is a time traveller from the future and saw the Neo Con Coup d' Etat of Leo Strauss's offspring changing the American Republic into the New Imperial Rome? :-)
If Schmidt is still alive some one should ask him. I never met him. Was he part of the Walter Breen, P.K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, Tim Leary Berkeley-Hollywood crowd?


PS
On Feb 5, 2004, at 6:56 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

"Do you have any idea why the author Schmidt might have
put Finkelstein on the side of repression?"

You tell me. You were his student. IMen of foresight and wisdom like Heisenberg, Bohm, and Finkelstein
tried to make their comrades see the error of their ways.
But it was too late ... Ruin came down on all alike ...

Tony, it looks like Schmidt puts David with us Good Guys? Why did you write:

"Do you have any idea why the author Schmidt might have
put Finkelstein on the side of repression?"


Oh, I see you give your reason as:

"The excerpts clearly show you as an advancer of knowledge,
but
it seems to me (maybe I am misreading, but I think that my
quotes are pretty much in accurate context) that the quotes
of statments by the Bishop about Heisenberg, Bohm, and Finkelstein
are approving statements by the authoritarian Bishop,
which would imply that they were considered to be on the side
of repression rather than free research."

But since I have not read the book, I cannot evaluate your suggestion. :-)