Jack Sarfatti. Dr Towler claimed Dr Sarfatti had "written something like 100 emails" since his invitation was withdrawn, "many ... suggesting that we are in the pay of the CIA".

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=411401&c=1

Please issue a retraction. I never wrote or implied or believed that Towler was in the pay of the CIA. You should have checked with me on that. It's bad journalism not to double check your sources. Towler's statement is blatant libel under British Law. It is clearly designed to make me look like lunatic conspiracy theory fool. I already called Towler out on that false allegation. Therefore, he had ample time to correct his wrong first-impression.

Valentini seems to be in a Schrodinger Cat state. Josephson and I both independently anticipated his "signal nonlocality", I ,in my back-action heuristic idea I gave at two Tucson II conferences that Towler cited in his Cambridge course calling me a "celebrity nut job," which I took with good humor BTW - Josephson in his paper with Pallikari "Biological Utilization of Quantum Nonlocality. Adrian Kent and others in the invite list are like kittens chasing their own tails simply refining in more sophisticated formalisms what we all know that signal locality is required for orthodox quantum theory to work. Valentini's "signal nonlocality" throws a monkey wrench into the whole scheme and Valentini knows that when he talks about "espionage" and breaking the security of quantum cryptography. How Valentini cannot see that living biological systems are precisely where we have his "sub-quantal non-equilbrium" astounds me and is a real blind spot in his generally imaginative thinking.

Jack Sarfatti, Ph.D.
San Francisco
http://stardrive.org (Blog)

No marks to THE for trivialising an important story in the print edition by illustrating it with a film still showing Scrooge confronting Marley's ghost, captioned "With them in spirit but 'unconventional' scholars may not be physically present."

I have been told that if I do attend this meeting I must not talk about how Valentni's key idea, on which his Ph.D. was based, supports the reality of paranormal phenomena. Fotini Pallikari-Viras and I thought of the basic concept independently, and published a paper on the connection in the journal Foundations of Physics in 1991.

Maybe I should have seen it coming; it is a classic example of how the physics establishment protects its incorrect world-model by censoring discussion of alternatives. But neither Towler nor Valentini should be blamed for this: they were pressurised into it by others.

I always find it amusing when people feel the need to list their qualifications at the end of a post, especially M.A. (Oxon).

It seems to me as a complete outsider to the "discipline" that eschewed views of the world - especially by self-appointed experts, about what is considered worthy or not worthy of discussion and examination - is only a manifestation of blinkered ignorance, rather than academic rigour!

If it is any consolation to Professors Sarfatti, Josephson and Peat, such a 'malaise' (generally by younger academics who are frustrated by the presence of the much wiser and accomplished researchers) is not unique to your discipline but is generally endemic in other disciplines as well!

Just to clear up one particular point. Sarfatti says:

"Please issue a retraction. I never wrote or implied or believed that Towler was in the pay of the CIA."

and

"It is clearly designed to make me look like lunatic conspiracy theory fool."

I've had a policy of not commenting publically on any of this crap, because I have some dignity. Instead I'll just pick a representative sample of Sarfatti quotes from some of the 100s of emails he has sent out to a good proportion of the world's population (in only 1 week!), and you can judge for yourself whether he's a 'lunatic conspiracy fool' or whether he thinks intelligence organizations are involved. (As this is a respectable publication I won't include the disgusting foul-mouthed quotes).

"This Bohm meeting was my brain child to begin with and Valentini needs to learn not to mess with the Zohan!"

"If it's a hoax it was carefully planned - probably by an intelligence
agency of some government or 'a malevolent fairy.'"

"It's obvious sabotage by anti-Bohmian agent provocateur infiltrators who have poor Valentini under control."

"There is also the obvious military significance of signal nonlocality in
non-equilibrium post-quantum matter."

"Seriously, Valentini's work, my work et-al all have very glaringly
obvious national security implications and is of interest to Intelligence
Agencies. That's a fact and that's why there is more to this case than meets the eye."

"Then the usual politics from a$$holes who control Valentini's and I guess Towler's future job prospects at Perimeter I think"

"Can Mike Towler be such a pushover and Valentini such a rude insensitive little prig?"

"Recourse to a solicitor is psychological pressure on Valentini, who after all is an impecunious party on a low-level pittance at Imperial College and my friend Uri Geller has graciously given me the time of his solicitors in London who will advise me on how to proceed later today if Valentini does not cave in."

"It would be good to settle this amicably before it is too late - for
Valentini that is."

"Working on my Amazon Review ;-) The book Valentini advertises below is a musty un-inspired boring reprise of heavily trod well-known material."

"The intelligence agencies of all the major powers are very interested in this kind of new physics, a fact that adds a surreal X-Files Twilight Zone Outer Limits cloak and dagger dimension to this whole affair."

"I was just about to arrange for a multi-million pound grant to Towler for his Institute, obviously I will not now proceed with my fund-raising there."

Damn it. I could have been rich.

And for what it's worth, the reason Jack was uninvited was stated by Valentini to be that "despite [Jack's] passion for theoretical physics", he failed to "adhere to high standards of argument and of presentation". Now this was definitely a euphemism, but not for 'believing in the paranormal'. Count his published papers.

Note finally:

"Re the conference, if I do come then people ought to be properly
educated, maybe by including a talk by a parapsychologist explaining why almost certainly telepathy etc. are real. Then people can have the real physics to talk about not the sanitised, politicised version." [B. Josephson]

This conference is not, repeat not, about the paranormal. It is not about zoology. I didn't invite any paranormal investigators for the same reason I didn't invite any zoologists (and needless to say, neither Jack nor Brian were formally invited - they asked me if they could attend, which is very different).

To all the people who've been enjoying this foul-mouthed campaign of lunatic harassment which is inciting crazies from around the world to threaten my family and that of Valentini, then shame on you. If like me, you're feeling a little bit disgusted, then apparently Jack has recently started honouring requests to be removed from his mailing lists.

Great. With a bunch of toddlers like these at the helm, I feel VERY confident in humanity's future. Or lack thereof. :-/

Seriously, folks - you're supposed to be adults. This bickering sounds nothing like anything I would ever expect to come from mature, adult individuals, save perhaps for some sort of mental disorder which, if such be the case, consider my criticism withdrawn.

Two points:

The first: To the best of my knowledge, there is to date zero evidence to support Valentini's 'non-quantum' theory -- at least, not of the kind he expects might support his idea. On the other hand, there is evidence for something rather odd going on (the word paranormal fails to properly represent the true nature of the evidence); this recorded in the US government's (partially declassified) document collection on paranormal phenomena.

The second: Valentini uses the word "espionage" in one of his papers. There are persons affiliated with US intelligence who have from time to time been associated with Dr. Sarfatti. One of these persons did at one time offer that he accepted the existence of "telepathy" as a fact. It is also a matter of the record of the United States government that the Intelligence Community pursued the use of telepathy as a communication method for the battlefield, as recently as the early 1990s. In addition to the records of the United States government, there are related files from the UK MoD. Whether or not you wish to entertain this 'exotic' possibility, there is no longer any question of the involvement of the international intelligence community.

Jack Sarfatti can you confirm that the quotes Mike included above are authentic?

Although Towler had a general intent to hold such a Bohm conference I was the instigator catalyst that collapsed his wavefunction so to speak. Here is the true story that Towler has been busy re-writing. I have the e-mails to prove my version for any historians of physics interested.

I caught wind of Towler's excellent on-line lectures on Bohmian physics in which he cites my idea of "back-action" that I gave in two talks at Stuart Hameroff's Tucson Conferences on Consciousness in the late 90's - published in their abstracts. The idea is that Shimony's "passion at a distance" the detente between entanglement and no signaling across spacelike intervals is understood in Bohm's theory as the fragility of the quantum potential Q. This means that Q pilots the trajectory of the hidden variable but the hidden variable does not directly back-react on Q. In other words, this is the "test particle" approximation for the hidden variable similar to the situation in General Relativity. In terms of the de-Broglie-Bohm-Vigier stochastic approach this is sub-quantal thermal equilibrium of the hidden variables.

Therefore, my idea anticipates Antony Valentini's "signal nonlocality." I proposed in Tucson that all living matter has such direct back action (no action without direct reaction so to speak). Obviously, living matter is not in thermal equilibrium in the key degrees of freedom, but are dissipative structures in Prigogine's sense. I then suggested that our inner conscious qualia is the effect of this self-organizing creative two-way spontaneously self-organizing feedback control loop. Furthermore, as shown by Roger Penrose in his semi-popular books (e.g. Emperor's New Mind) discussing Libet's presponse, there is an element of retro-causality consistent with the old Wheeler-Feyman idea.

Towler cited me for the above in his Cambridge lectures as a "celebrity nut job" that I took with good humor. He later wrote that his colleagues call him a "nut job" - presumably because of his interest in Bohm.

Well I contacted Towler by email and by August of 2009 we were talking about having a meeting on Bohm in 2010 and I contributed to bouncing around some rough ideas with him before Valentini was even in the picture.

I stayed at Trinity College Cambridge for a week in September 2009 where Towler and I met and discussed the idea further with Josephson. Towler was on his way to Perimeter Institute where he said he would discuss the idea with Valentini. I also said that I would try to get some funding for the meeting - there was never a quid pro quo that my attendance was contingent on me getting money for Towler. Also I told Towler that I was mainly interested in listening not talking at that workshop. My main interest was Valentini's idea of signal nonlocality, which in Valentini's words, could be used for "espionage" and breaking quantum cryptography security.

I am an informal "senior advisor" to Dr. Ronald Pandolfi, of the Science & Technology Directorate of the CIA and the MASINT program. Indeed, I was Pandolfi's guest at a JASON meeting at General Atomics in June 2008 in La Jolla. Therefore, for Towler to tell the Times Higher Education Supplement that I thought Towler was in the pay of the CIA was blatantly false and I had previously admonished Towler not to spread that false story to the press.

So that's how it started the rest is history. Of course both Towler and Valentini were aware of our unconventional views from the beginning. Updates on this situation are at my stardrive.org blog.

In answer to Eric about Towler's quotes of me. First let me say that I am a New Yawker ;-) with a big mouth and a temper when attacked personally such as Valentini essentially saying I am incompetent. The remarks Towler quotes are a mixture of anger, satire, humor and righteous indignation - a natural emotional response. However, let's be more specific and consider each one:

Towler: Sarfatti says:

"Please issue a retraction. I never wrote or implied or believed that Towler was in the pay of the CIA."

I stand by that. I never wrote or insinuated that Towler was in the pay of the CIA.

and

"It is clearly designed to make me look like a lunatic conspiracy theory fool."

Obviously a true statement. Also not hundreds of emails in a week but a few dozen (mainly corrections & afterthoughts in the heat of battle).

"This Bohm meeting was my brain child to begin with and Valentini needs to learn not to mess with the Zohan!"

True statement by me with a joke referring to the comedy motion picture about the Israeli super-hero.

"If it's a hoax it was carefully planned - probably by an intelligence agency of some government or 'a malevolent fairy.'"

Obviously a satirical joke. Towler's tin ear does not get my literary allusions to Cervantes Don Quixote and Gilbert & Sullvan's Iolanthe. Here we have the problem pointed out by C.P.Snow in the Two Cultures and his novels of the Sunni-Shia type split in the hallowed halls of ivy and the corridors of power.

"It's obvious sabotage by anti-Bohmian agent provocateur infiltrators who have poor Valentini under control."

Clear satire like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Towler is pulling my jokes out of context - he is much too literal here.

"There is also the obvious military significance of signal nonlocality in non-equilibrium post-quantum matter."

This is a fact. What's objectionable about it?

"Seriously, Valentini's work, my work et-al all have very glaringly obvious national security implications and is of interest to Intelligence Agencies. That's a fact and that's why there is more to this case than meets the eye."

Again this is a fact. What's objectionable about it?

"Then the usual politics from a$$holes who control Valentini's and I guess Towler's future job prospects at Perimeter I think"

Yes, I wrote that in anger when I first got Valentini's letter. Since Valentini was insulting and rude in his letter why should I be held to a higher standard? Indeed, what Valentini and Towler have done is the moral equivalent of manslaughter since a man of my type's identity is in the body of his ideas. Rejecting ideas without proper consideration of what they actually are because of some general prejudice (e.g. paranormal taboo) is a kind of suffocation of the spirit.

"Can Mike Towler be such a pushover and Valentini such a rude insensitive little prig?"

What's wrong with that? It's very apt under the circumstances when someone insults you and basically tries to paint you as an idiot lunatic conspiracy kook.

"Recourse to a solicitor is psychological pressure on Valentini, who after all is an impecunious party on a low-level pittance at Imperial College and my friend Uri Geller has graciously given me the time of his solicitors in London who will advise me on how to proceed later today if Valentini does not cave in."

"It would be good to settle this amicably before it is too late - for
Valentini that is."

Yes, I wrote that. Part of a negotiation. It's accurate. Valentini and Towler were put under similar pressure from some of the invitees, but Towler does not print what they told him.

"Working on my Amazon Review ;-) The book Valentini advertises below is a musty un-inspired boring reprise of heavily trod well-known material."

Yes, and it's true. Valentini's latest book is exactly as I describe it. I hope his next book is better.

"The intelligence agencies of all the major powers are very interested in this kind of new physics, a fact that adds a surreal X-Files Twilight Zone Outer Limits cloak and dagger dimension to this whole affair."

A true statement with some satirical humor at the end.

"I was just about to arrange for a multi-million pound grant to Towler for his Institute, obviously I will not now proceed with my fund-raising there."

A true statement.

Damn it. I could have been rich.

And for what it's worth, the reason Jack was uninvited was stated by Valentini to be that "despite [Jack's] passion for theoretical physics", he failed to "adhere to high standards of argument and of presentation". Now this was definitely a euphemism, but not for 'believing in the paranormal'. Count his published papers.

Let me say that I have not been an academic since 1970. Therefore, it is not appropriate to judge me by traditional academic standards of publish or perish. But Towler knew that from the beginning. However, my paper on application of Bohmian ontology to practical problems in quantum chemistry with Creon Levit has been oft-cited. Creon is a scientist at NASA AMES and winner of the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology and head of NASA Nanoelectronics. Also Towler cited my original version of "signal nonlocality" in his Bohm Cambridge lectures as mentioned in my earlier comment. He may have deleted it by now in true Orwellian 1984 fashion - I have not checked.

Note finally:

"Re the conference, if I do come then people ought to be properly educated, maybe by including a talk by a parapsychologist explaining why almost certainly telepathy etc. are real. Then people can have the real physics to talk about not the sanitised, politicised version." [B. Josephson]

This conference is not, repeat not, about the paranormal. It is not about zoology. I didn't invite any paranormal investigators for the same reason I didn't invite any zoologists (and needless to say, neither Jack nor Brian were formally invited - they asked me if they could attend, which is very different).

To all the people who've been enjoying this foul-mouthed campaign of lunatic harassment which is inciting crazies from around the world to threaten my family and that of Valentini, then shame on you. If like me, you're feeling a little bit disgusted, then apparently Jack has recently started honouring requests to be removed from his mailing lists.

I cannot be responsible for how information spreads on the web and who reads it. I have advised Towler to call in Scotland Yard if he is getting threats and I will cooperate fully with the authorities to find the guilty parties making such illegal threats. However, Josephson has pointed out that Towler himself has put too much information out on the web in that regard. Also let me say, as I did before, that had Valentini and Towler only disinvited me I would not have gone public at all and would have saved thousands of dollars on a trip in peak season when Europe is usually uncomfortably hot. It was only when Josephson and Peat sent me their Valentini letters that I jumped on the war path.

"neither Jack nor Brian were formally invited - they asked me if they could attend, which is very different"

Anyone familiar with the original emails will recognise that their patronising tone set the stage for everything that followed.

My comment about inviting parapsychologists which Mike quotes was made rather tongue in cheek, and I did not really expect it to be taken seriously; it was only to make a point. However, the response shows that no mention of the paranormal, even in the context of Bohmian quantum mechanics, is to be allowed here. As regards Mike's zoology comment, quite a number of people at the Cavendish work on applications of physics to biology, and it seems to me that if linking physics and biology is good enough for the Cavendish, it ought to be acceptable also for this conference.

A colleague who evidently shares Bill Shroyer's views has commented on this whole business "this seems to be 100% a boy's game", and I think this means I have written enough and should stop at this point.

Funny I was thinking exactly the same as Brian about having written enough. I will say no more about the politics unless provoked. I would prefer to discuss the physics ideas I presented above - the fire behind the smoke.

Physicists who think that organisms are "living bio-paste" (Colin Bennett) are probably missing something important. A physical description of organisms as crystals is possible; see www.cell-division-program.com

Towler smears and libels me when he says I made "disgusting foul mouthed" remarks to him or anyone else in this affair. I challenge him to reproduce them for the record.

Ironically, Drs. Towler and Valentini would have also probably disinvited David Bohm, on whose work the conference is founded. Dr. Bohm published a paper harmonizing his theory with parapsychological phenomena in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, in the context of gratefully receiving an award from that society. And, of course, they would have also sent into academic exile Newton, Kepler, and a considerable number of Nobel prizewinners in physics and other fields, all of whom have supported unconventional ideas ...

Yes, I think we should focus on the wider issues now, rather than this affair which will soon be forgotten. One point is that many intelligent readers of this discussion will be very aware in one way or another that telepathy is something real, yet people in academia are afraid to say this out loud as they may suffer if they do (indeed, Towler has indicated that one factor behind these disinvitations was the idea that people might suffer e.g. in their job prospects were they to attend a meeting where subjects such as telepathy might be discussed).

It is said that science is a self-correcting process, but this episode makes it very clear that mechanisms exist that can obstruct such self-correction. What happens as a result is that we the scientific community separates into two groups, the elite caste who either dismiss ESP etc. outright or who pretend that they do for the sake of their careers; and the Untouchables who accept the reality and try to advance the science thereof.

You, the public, fund the scientific enterprise. Please try to do something about this ridiculous situation! Write to your MP!

I might add here that there is a similar problem in regard to complementary medicine, where the elite class bring up all sorts of doubtfully legimitate arguments to try to stop complementary medicine practices. For example, failure to prove is equated with proof of failure, or the elite can't see that a whole situation may have an influence that exceeds the sum of the influences of the parts. A colleague at Cambridge University has shown just this for a Traditional Chinese Medicine remedy, where it appears that one component can neutralise the harmful side-effects of the main ingredient. The influence of the Elite here , while it can do good in disclosing problems, may at the same time be having harmful effects on the health of our nation through blundering into things that they do not fully understand.

Can't help feeling that, if telepathy is real, one doesn't actually need to say it out loud....

The institutionalized suppression of ANY information dealing with the outermost limits of human potential and its manifest traits is a common historical theme in Western society. David Bohm did not strike up a dialogue with the likes of Krishamurti on a whim.

The cloistering and closeting of actual activities that directly attest to sub-rosa application of the so called "paranormal" among an elite and their interest in keeping such things well under wraps speaks volumes about Machiavellian intent. Politicized hypocrisy is written all over Towler and Valentini's arbitrary manipulation of Bohm's physics. Maladroit use of fair minded people as pin-cushions for their poison is as clumsy as it is irrational. Continual replication of academic practices that substitute the part for the whole is also apparent in Western medicine and the social sciences.

So it is perfectly OK if the Queen of England herself is encouraged to deliver the "Royal Touch" - but punishable heresy if commoners duplicate her success to alleviate human suffering.

Just who do Towler and Valentini think they are fooling? Fewer and fewer open and honest individuals, methinks. Lux lucit in tenebris.

I would like to make a public statement about this.

The fuss stemmed from a private email that I wrote to Prof. Brian Josephson on the 19th April 2010, regarding a conference (about the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics) which I am co-organising with Dr. Mike Towler. The matter has recently erupted into the public domain with the publication of a rather misleading article in Times Higher Education.

Conference organisers are sometimes required to make difficult judgements, and of course mistakes can and do occur. The email I wrote was an attempt to deal with a difficult and complex organisational problem internal to the conference. It was not intended as a literal statement of my views about the scientific status of research into the 'paranormal'. Nor did the wording accurately convey the nature of Prof. Josephson's early association with the conference.

For the record, and contrary to what many are claiming: I am not in principle opposed to the careful and scientific investigation of alleged anomalies, whatever they may be.

This view seems to me entirely obvious and uncontroversial.

Some will ask why I wrote an email apparently 'dis-inviting' a participant. Normally, such a step would of course be a regrettable breach of basic etiquette, and the recipient could reasonably complain strongly (and in private) to the organisers. However, as many will have learned from Dr. Towler (who started planning the conference before I got involved), certain alleged 'invitees' were in fact never formally invited.

Even so, some may ask why certain people became associated with a conference that is outside their domain of expertise, and which was never intended to be about the paranormal. Others feel driven to suggest that I was forced to write the email by a sinister power, and attempt to portray this episode as a bigoted attempt to suppress radical ideas. Some have simply concluded that there were probably good (if obscure) reasons for my writing the email, while others have seen fit to make comments without knowing the full (and private) facts behind the case.

In my view, if I may say, these matters are the business of the conference organisers and not of anybody else.

Prof. Josephson took the regrettable step of posting my email, in full and with author signature, on his website. (The author information and some of the text has now been removed.) This act encouraged a storm of protest from some of Prof. Josephson's associates, partly in the form of a large volume of misleading emails sent to all the conference participants as well as to dozens of others (including journalists) and partly in the form of postings on various websites, including one that by any reasonable standard can only be described as deliberately defamatory.

Private correspondence (whether by conventional or electronic mail) should be treated as private, and should not be placed in the public domain without the author's consent. The internet is an evolving medium, and one can query the suitability of standard constraints in this context. However, I suggest that we all take a deep breath, and ask ourselves if it is wise to blur the distinction between private and public correspondence in this way.

It is my view that a private matter between Prof. Josephson and myself has been brought into the public domain in a manner that is inappropriate and improper, as well as unhelpful and deeply misleading.

Some will regard my attitude as old-fashioned. For the other side of the argument, I can recommend a book by Lee Siegel, whose title speaks for itself: Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.