SDI: Rust In Peace

Contact with Lawrence Chickering of the policy think tank Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) led to Sarfatti acting as a consultant for the Reagan Administration's fledgling Strategic Defence Initiative (or Star Wars project). This brought Sarfatti into the twilight world of half-truths, where the obsessive apparatus of State security interlocks with sinister forces from big business.

"I spent a lot of time with Marshall Naify in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He is a billionaire and was Chairman of United Artists back then. He was a Hollywood mogul and certainly knew Reagan. Naify, Lawrence Chickering and I had lunch at Enrico's maybe in 1981, where Naify spent at least half an hour describing in detail what would later be Star Wars SDI. Chickering worked directly with Ed Meese. [In the early 1980s Meese was a confidante of Reagan. Meese's Institute for Contemporary Studies think-tank was admired by Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, and Chickering. He became U.S. Attorney General under Reagan but was caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal.] He asked me to write a memo based on this lunch and some of my own ideas. Around this time, I I had a correspondence with Igor Akchurin of the Soviet Academy of Sciences on all of this - so the Soviet Intelligence were getting from us that SDI would really work!

"Chickering told me that my memo was well received and that, in particular, Paul Nitze, Reagan's chief arms control guy read it and 'liked it.' In addition, Casper Weinberger's son was feeding my stuff to his dad, who discussed it with Reagan.

Caffe Trieste and Enrico's were the favourite slumming places for Hollywooders and other 'rich and famous' when they visited San Francisco, says Sarfatti. Having been taught at Cornell in the '50s by "the guys who built the bomb," Sarfatti was now encountering "Reagan's people who were tapping the brains of the North Beach bohemians using the Caffe Trieste" in a bid to build what was then considered the ultimate nuclear warhead for the SDI project.

"Cornell is an Ivy League School, and the CIA is run by Ivy League guys," says Sarfatti. "I was a rebel and a 'loose cannon,' but I was still Ivy League and part of the old-boy network whether I wanted to be or not. I was 'stable' enough for the Naval Intelligence to allow me on nuclear-weapons-carrying aircraft carriers 'on station,' sometimes under battle-readiness Condition Zebra."

Strange Loops and God-Phones

During the 1980s, Sarfatti concentrated on investigating superluminal, or faster than light (FTL) communication. Jung's synchronicity meme ("meaningful coincidences", or John Lilly's 'Cosmic Coincidence Control') challenges causality and suggests that quantum-mechanics theory is incomplete. Taking a step further, he designing and obtained a patent disclosure for a 'God Phone' - a machines designed to decode such messages. In Science: Good, Bad & Bogus, Martin Gardner stated with tongue-in-cheek irony: "I know of no other physicist who thinks it will work. If it does, Sarfatti will become one of the greatest physicists of all time." None of them could work because he was missing the key idea of 'back action.' Sarfatti's early designs tried to use ordinary quantum mechanics, and, therefore, violated Eberhard's theorem. Back-action is really new physics beyond quantum mechanics. As Nobel laureate Brian Josephson explains: "His initial attempts had the air of attempts to derive a perpetual motion machine in the sense that there were mathematical demonstrations of the impossibility. Hence I, like others felt he was wasting his time.

"But there may always be problems with one's basic assumptions, and this is what he and others are looking at now. I doubt, however, if this has led to his reputation improving generally, since he is still working on the basis of unverified theories. If he could make a more specific model in this new area in the way that he tried to produce models (which didn't work) earlier, then things could change. But the responses to [Henry] Stapp's publication of a similar kind in Physical Review should make one wary of believing that people will easily be made more open-minded."

'Who is Number One?'

But other cultural analysts aren’t so sure. Sarfatti has had fierce arguments with Stuart Hameroff about his post-quantum 'back-action' theorem. He dismisses Murray Gell-Mann and the influential Santa Fe Institute as a modern-day Laputan Academy, because he believes that Gell-Mann artificially abstracts the mind's active non-algorithmic understanding as emphasised by Roger Penrose. "Therefore the mind-brain system is a classical-quantum information machine, which undermines the misconceived classical theories of consciousness of Francis Crick, Marvin Minsky, Paul Churchland, Daniel C. Dennett, William Calvin, and Gerald Edelman," claims Sarfatti. And he is angry at the confused physics espoused by populist New Age writers who lack the scientific training to interpret Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and David Bohm's legacies correctly.

Colleague Fred Alan Wolf offers a succinct explanation of the nature of these psychological conflicts: "Jack is brilliant but has a serious problem when dealing with people. He doesn't suffer fools very well. And a 'fool' to Jack is often anyone who doesn't agree with him. However, Jack has had a major influence on many people including myself. He has encouraged many to think freely and to engage in very imaginative scientific rambling often leading to new insights."

Don Webb, the Texas-based science fiction writer who has mentioned Sarfatti's theories in his novels and short stories, and who has had anomalous experiences of his own, offers yet another perspective: "He has had some very unusual experiences and been privy to strange secrets. I sometimes get the feeling that like the Lovecraftian hero, Sarfatti has ventured too far past the Looking Glass, and not fully returned. This is an occupational hazard for those who will investigate the secret and suppressed parts of history: they may make stunning discoveries in one area whilst blighting their personal reputations in another. Conventional society fears nothing more than the isolate psyche whose genius isn’t working towards the pre-conceived aims of the group-mind (super-organism). 'Radical friction' as a postmodern survival stratagem where there is no clearly ruling societal paradigm is required as a necessity to annihilate resistance. It overcomes the forces of naturalisation, which over time tend toward hatred and ignorance."

Unlocking the 'Destiny Matrix'

Future causality has influenced the contemporary cultural meme pool. Sarfatti's fellow student at UCSD, Gregory Benford, uses a chilling 'doomed earth' future scenario in his Hugo-winning novel Timescape (New York: Pocket Books, 1980). Californian physicists in a 1962 timeline attempt to decipher a Morse Code-like warning sent from a Cambridge, England physicist in a 1998 timeline, whose world is facing catastrophic environmental devastation. Benford sets these irregularities, according to Sarfatti, against the realistic backdrop of academic physics research subculture: pressures from the university and government, the struggle for grants, the impact upon personal relationships, and the pressures of the wider scientific race for knowledge.

Chris Marker's acclaimed 1963 short La Jetee which influenced Sarfatti, formed the basis for the recent thriller Twelve Monkeys (1995). The Back to the Future trilogy (1985-1990) along with James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1995) also feature the meme. Sarfatti remarks: "If these authors are receiving messages from the future, it may be reflecting the same message."