Leonard Susskind and Jack Sarfatti together at Cornell 1962

I don't recall writing that letter, but obviously I did. So it was triggered by their Rev Mod Phys paper. At that time I was co-running NSF Summer School in Macroscopic Quantum Physics at San Diego State. So this theme has been a constant in my physical thinking. Definitely George Parrent Jr at Tech/Ops got me on that problem in early 1962 BEFORE I got back to Cornell and beat the drum on it to Susskind, and of course I brought Glogower back to Cornell with me in Fall 1962. I was at Cornell 1956 - 60.

You know it's important that the naive phase operator with U not unitary not be unitary! Even today, Susskind is still stuck in unitarity! Remember Feynman did not even know what "unitarity" was at the beginning in his work on Dirac's Lagrangian for quantum histories. Susskind even got Hawking to make his greatest blunder at GR 17! While unitarity is OK (ignoring measurements) in closed micro-quantum systems it is WRONG for open systems and it is WRONG for MACRO-QUANTUM SYSTEMS where the information wave and a large number of particles fuse - enter signal nonlocality and Bierman's presponse. Strict unitarity with signal locality and no-cloning a quantum is a BORING UNIVERSE that forbids the emergence of CREATIVE new orders from "More is different". BTW it was London and Von Neumann who put "consciousness" into quantum physics. Antony Valentini, building on Josephson, showed how tenuous is signal locality AKA "passion at a distance". The nonlocal unitary rules of linear micro-quantum theory are suspended for local non-unitary nonlinear MACRO-QUANTUM theory out of which Einstein's general relativity GRAVITY with dark energy springs from the PARTIAL COHERING of the micro-quantum zero point vacuum fluctuations of the PRE-INFLATIONARY false vacuum with all rest masses m = 0 and NO GRAVITY at all.

On Dec 13, 2004, at 6:16 PM, Gary S. Bekkum wrote:


Jack see reference #15 in the paper by Nieto.

"[15] Letter and _Historical corrections_ by J. Sarfatt sent to E. U. Condon, editor of Rev. Mod. Phys., dated 20 May 1968, with copies sent to many individuals, including Carruthers, Louisell, Nieto, and Susskind. Also included was a copy of part of (not all of) an undated, handwritten letter from L. Susskind to J. Sarfatt.
[16] J. Sarfatt, Nuovo Cimento 27 (1963) 1119.
[17] L. Susskind and J. Glogower, Physics 1 (1964) 49.
[18] P. Carruthers and M. M. Nieto, Am. J. Phys. 33 (1965) 537.
[19] P. Carruthers and M. M. Nieto, Rev. Mod. Phys. 40 (1968) 441.
[20] Letter from P. Carruthers to J. Sarfatt, dated 6 June 1968.


After Carruthers_ and my review appeared [19], Sarfatt wrote the letter referred to earlier [15]. He wanted historical corrections to be published giving him credit. In the _Historical corrections_ of his communication, given as our Ref. [15], he wrote: . . . In turn I ran across the fact that a Hermitian phase operator could not be defined in informal discussions with the late Dr. David Falcoff and some of his students at Brandeis during 1961-1962. Glogower was responsible for the ingenious mathematical solution of certain recursion relations, and Susskind did the bulk of the work on the proper form of the commutation relations for the C and S operators as well as the appropriate
eigenfunctions. There is no question that Susskind completed the greater
part of the final work on his own, but there is equally no question that the paper never would have been written were it not for my participation in the crucial initial stages when we were not even clear about the qualitative nature of the problem. Sarfatt also quoted from, and enclosed a copy of part of, a handwritten note from Susskind. It stated

. . . Any way I feel bad about forgetting to acknowledge you. Glo and
myself debated whether to put you as an author or Acknowledgement and
in the scuffle I forgot. . . . Lenny

Carruthers wrote a kind letter to Sarfatt in return, gently pointing out that [20] . . . They (SG) did not acknowledge my aid either, although I spent a lot of time encouraging them and in reading the final MS! . . . I_d like to remind you that in the fall of 1962 I gave a homework problem in which I asked for a discussion of the existence of °. My curiosity on this point arose independently of your own, as I recall. (Also Louisell [21].) In any event, I think that my problem, or your remark, however perceptive and important towards motivating the solution, did not especially deserve reference. (We [19] did not intend to present a complete historical document.) . . .

Well, this article is a more, but not entirely, complete historical document, so I have related the above. (However, as you might expect, some of the things in my files are slightly more pugnacious than I have quoted.) In any event, eventually Sarfatt added an _i_ to his name and went into Physics Consciousness [22]."

I did not "add" the i. The i was properly restored. It was stolen from me at my birth. This is a very important correction of another historical error by the "Victorian Station Masters" in Colin Bennett's sense.

"Later, alternative phase operators were developed. I mention four of the more important schemes [23, 24, 25, 26]. The critical points always were if a Hermitian phase was possible or not, if alternative sine and cosine operators commuted among themselves, and if the sums of the squares of these operators was unity."

Note that the sine and cosine operators DO NOT COMMUTE with each other, and the sums of the squares ARE NOT UNITY. This is telling us something important that Carruthers, Nieto and Susskind STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND TODAY! Indeed, Hawking was on the right track until Susskind led him off the true path through his Journey from Inferno to Paradiso. ;-)

See Werbos "backward in time" and Bierman's "presponse". Quantum computer theory rests on very shaky ground indeed. "Quantum computers" is more hype like "string theory" I suspect.

Theoretical physics today really is mostly "Fashion, Faith and Fantasy" (R. Penrose) - it has really become decadent post-modern.