Something Wiki this way comes
Jack Sarfatti
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jack Sarfatti is a frequent poster to certain Usenet groups, such as sci.physics. His contributions, which are notable for their extensive use of technical buzzwords, are often incorrectly regarded as incoherent.

Sarfatti's websites have earned the crankiest rating from the crank.net website. (See links below.)

"Sarfatti is eccentric, but his knowledge of basic cosmology issues is razor sharp. As an example he was able to carefully delineate the basic flaw in the zero point energy paradigm as it relates to the Einstein cosmological constant, which I found extremely useful to know." A. Beckwith

Unlike most who have been labeled crackpots, Sarfatti does have an academic background in theoretical physics. He earned an undergraduate from Cornell University in 1960, where he wrote an honor's thesis under the guidance of Hans Bethe. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from UCR in 1969, writing a thesis under the direction of Fred Cummings. He taught at San Diego State was a Research Fellow under David Bohm University of London and Abdus Salam (ICTP) before venturing into non-academic pursuits. Sarfatti's 1967 paper "The Goldstone Theorem and the Jahn-Teller Effect, written with Marshall Stoneham (later head of Theoretical Physics Div, Harwell UKAERE, is cited in American Institute of Physics "Resource Letter on Symmetry in Physics." Ray Chiao, professor of physics at Berkeley credits Sarfatti's 1967 paper on self-trapped laser filaments as analogy with Type II superconductor vortices as helpful in his early experiments in nonlinear optics. Leonard Susskind, inventor of string theory, credits Sarfatti's help in his first published paper in 1964 at Cornell on quantum phase and time operators. Susskind and Sarfatti were students together with Johnny Glogower.

Sarfatti predicted the recently observed ODLRO "supersolid" in Physics Letters A before Nobel Prize Tony Leggett did. George Chapline, who according to http://www.wyp-ptm.org/lecturers.html#chapline "... received the U.S. Department of Energy E.O. Lawrence Award in 1983 and served as Science Advisor to the Associate Lab Director for Defense Programs at the Los Alamos National Labs in 2000 and 2001 ..." wrote on 16 February 2005, saying in part: "... Jack, Your solid He4 superfluid paper is wonderful! ... This paper is a precursor to quantum gravity, and much more important in that regard than string theory ( you can quote me). george ...".

Tony Smith web site at http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/


Sarfatti has had three books published by Author House since 2002, Destiny Matrix, Space-Time and Beyond II & Super Cosmos. He was awarded the Victor von Frankenstein "Weird Science" Award in December 2004 by the denizens of the alt.usenet.kooks newsgroup.
[edit]

See also

* Usenet, an article about the Usenet in general

[edit]

External links

* Reality check], an essay by the late physicist Milton Rothman who, like Heinz Pagels, allegedly died shortly after dissing Sarfatti it appears, reviewing for the skeptic group CSICOP the (apparently defunct) website of something called the Internet Science Education Project, a "corporation" apparently created by Jack Sarfatti,
* Crank dot net, a very extensive list of cranky websites,
* Part 1 of the net-legends FAQ,
* Is Jack Sarfatti a kook or a genius.., a thread from sci.physics,
* disformation (an interview of Sarfatti),
* a Sarfatti website,
* a Sarfatti web page containing some snippets of autobiography by Sarfatti, including photographs of himself literally at sea (on the flight deck of a carrier); see what appears to be Sarfatti's own account of the phone calls mentioned above,
* a Sarfatti website,
* a Sarfatti blog.