Since he first came to the Bay Area in the mid-1970s, physicist Jack Sarfatti has been a provocative presence in local intellectual life.

Leaping from North Beach cafes to leading policy think-tanks, he has cut a broad intellectual swath, challenging the preconceptions of poets, political thinkers and physicists alike.

With a background in quantum theory, he claims to break new ground in scientific understanding of the eternal questions: "Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?"

In this interview, he discusses the breakdown of a paradigm that, for centuries in the West, has viewed science and humanistic thought as irrevocably separated.

Q: Let's begin with the paradigm of the two cultures. I think most of us who grew up in the 1950s and '60s were taught that in the intellectual world, science and the humanities were radically different.

A: The literary culture was thought to be more of a culture of feeling and intuition, where science was cold and calculated. I think that was really the basic thing. Science was highly mathematical, linear thinking, where the artistic and the creative side, the poetry, was all in the nonscientific world.

Q: Intellectuals in science and in the nonscientific fields didn't talk to each other very much?

A: Not only did they not talk to each other, as I can remember from my own adolescence and attitude. . . . But at Cornell in the 1950s, all these bright science kids on full scholarship funded by the Defense Department would go on and on about how weak-minded and un-macho the literature students were. There was a definite sense of superiority, involving both sides against each other. There was a real split.

Q: Cornell had great scientific figures in the physics department, like Hans Bethe and Philip Morrison, and in the literature department, you had Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest modern authors. So there was ground on both sides of the divide for a certain arrogance.

A: Among the undergraduates, but even among the professors. If you look at Richard Feynman's books, and Feynman was a great mathematical and physics genius, he talks about the philosophers, and he makes fun of the Cornell philosophy department. You can see the conflict, the divide, in Feynman's autobiography, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" which sold millions of copies.

Q: Feynman had a somewhat snobbish and arrogant attitude, about hard science as compared with philosophy and literature. But at the same time you're describing books by him that are best-sellers. So Feynman, who started out from the position of rigid division between the scientific intellect and the nonscientific intellect, ended up breaking through that division?

A: Of course, Feynman's saving grace in this regard was that he was a comedian, he was very theatrical, musical. He was artistic himself.

Feynman died of a cancer that he got because at Alamogordo, at the test of the first atomic bomb in 1945, he stood up when the bomb went off -- his young wife had just died. It was very romantic -- he stood up as the blast went off and irradiated himself. Feynman later spent time with John Lilly experiencing psychedelic drugs at Esalen. I have seen unpublished poetry that Feynman wrote toward the end of his life and his accounts of mystical experiences at Esalen while under the influence of certain substances.

Q: Feynman, then, found a way through the gap between the two cultures. But perhaps the gap between the two was narrower than people thought. We define modernity, modern ideas and the modern intellectual landscape as created by Lenin, Freud, Marcel Duchamp and Einstein. The new physics was originally baffling to the world, but that very bafflement, in a way, ended up making it part of the common store of the modernist intellect, because it was so novel, right there with psychoanalysis, surrealism, with 20th century radical politics. Would you say that the ideas of a new physics eventually became part of the general store of the ideas of modern society?

A: Absolutely. Physicists, because of their great intellectual honesty, were forced, kicking and screaming, across the divide. They really had no choice.

It was not only Einstein that pushed them in that direction, but the later discoveries of quantum physics, primarily due to Niels Bohr. Bohr was the leader, who pushed people into this kind of surrealist view of the world, pushed the physicists themselves, even if they didn't want to be there.

They were very happy in the old classical, pre-Einsteinian physics of the 17th to 19th centuries.

Q: Describe the intellectual world and the physical world before Einstein.

A: That world was -- it's already a cliche -- a clockwork universe, where the cosmos was a great machine, in which if you gathered enough information at any moment in time, you could predict with certainty every aspect of the future history of the universe.

It was a completely determined universe, like a great clock ticking in an absolute, immutable way. The concept of time was that there was an absolute time and there was nothing you could do about it; and there was empty space, and there were these hard little particles moving around in space and there were these fields, electromagnetic fields, force fields, everywhere in space, which helped move these particles, helped accelerate the particles.

There was certainly no room for life and mind as a physical phenomenon. There was no way within the classical physics of the 17th and 19th century to account for life itself.

You had the idea of the elan vital, the vitalist movement in biology. It was thought that life itself must be something beyond the physical, beyond the laws of physics; there was some other level.

And, of course, that also helped fuel the divide between the two cultures because, certainly, on the poetic, literary side of the two cultures, they thought they had a monopoly on the spirit and consciousness. Because that was the beyond. They were right in a way, because there was nothing in the old physics that could account for consciousness within physics. And you had an external God and all that stuff.

Q: So then one day, a man came along and basically said the universe was not a traditional clock at all, and his name was Albert Einstein.

A: Einstein is a complex figure. Suddenly, when he was in his early 20s, with his theory of relativity, he revolutionized our ideas of time and space and matter and energy. Or you could say Einstein saw the universe as a clock, but it was a Salvador Dali "soft watch," a kind of surrealist cosmos, because time was stretching, because time was not absolute anymore.

For example, Einstein talked about a moving clock. If the clock was moving very close to the speed of light, the clock would look as though it were running slow. If you had a meter stick that was moving past you close to the speed of light, the meter stick would contract, would look contracted in the direction of motion. It will not contract perpendicular to motion, but in the direction of motion.

So, space would squeeze down, and time would stretch out.

Q: So it's not an orderly and predictable universe, by our standards.

A: Not in quantum theory; but all relativity does is stretch time. There's no such thing as absolute time in relativity anymore. Or space; time and space are relative. You can literally travel in time, or, at least, introduce the idea of time travel. You can time travel to the future. And that's standard physics.

With what Einstein did in his relativity theory, there is still a kind of determinism. So it's a machine. It's not a rigid machine, it's a more flexible machine. But in relativity, it's still a machine.

That's the important part. Relativity is still a machine-like theory; it is like classical physics, but changes our notions of space and time, and also shows the equivalence of mass to energy, leading to things like the atomic bomb.

Q: The 1920s was a period of great cultural ferment. Einstein in a strange sense is a sort of Lenin of science; he's this dramatic, revolutionary figure who breaks down all of the accepted institutions. The Nazis denounced Einstein as Jewish science, but other reactionaries denounced Einstein for overthrowing the universe as they knew it. Is Niels Bohr the next figure who you feel brought forward an idea that could also be grasped in general and intellectual terms?

A: Bohr really introduced epistemology or idealism, idealistic thought, into modern physics, because of the paradoxes of the quantum theory and the breakdown of determinism. The breakdown of the clockwork universe upset a lot of physicists.

Bohr had a very dominating personality, like Socrates. He could talk anybody under the table. Bohr got everyone to agree with him except one man, and that was Albert Einstein. The Einstein/Bohr debate went on for the rest of their lives.

Einstein was an objectivist, saying there really is a reality out there; there is something real to talk about. Bohr would say that, basically, all we can do with physics is predict correlations between mental experiences, the experiences of the observer. Bohr brought mind into center stage in the world of physics.

Even though Einstein was a revolutionary in some ways, he was conservative at the same time.

Q: One can say that all of the great revolutionary figures in culture have a very radical side and also a very conservative side.

A: Let's put it this way: paradox. The idea of paradox is an essential part of quantum theory, the new physics. But it's only paradox relative to the old classical ideas of either/or.

If you have a world of either/or, then the new physics, quantum physics, goes beyond the either/or and you have to play with paradox and understand that paradox from the either/or point of view. If you think quantum mechanically, you just accept the paradox as part of the way things are.

Bohr introduced a certain "necessity of irrationality" in the new physics. Bohr said: "Don't even try to conceive of certain things." In classical physics, we had the idea of particles moving continuously in space through time. In principle, you can picture every little detail of that. Bohr said: "At the quantum level, you can't do that anymore. Renounce it. You can't do it. You cannot think of a particle, little particles, moving through space and time at the quantum level. That's only like a classical approximation. And thou shalt not think that way at the quantum level."

This was amazing -- and Einstein didn't like it, at all. This is the basis of the Einstein/Bohr debate. Can you picture detailed processes in space and time at the quantum level? Bohr says no; Einstein says yes, there should be a way.

What Einstein said was, the quantum theory that Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were developing was a statistical theory, and it cannot be a complete theory, because there must be a deeper point of view where you can picture individual processes in a detailed way.

Q: That's supposed to be what science is. It's supposed to be the naturalistic description of the universe.

A: Einstein still held to that kind of objective, detailed picture of things.

Q: And Bohr said that the highest triumph of science is to recognize that you can't do science in that way.

A: That debate is still going on today.

Q: An interesting intersection between the two cultures has recently emerged. A Shakespeare scholar, Jonathan Bate, has published an article showing that the English writer William Empson, one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century, began in mathematics and physics. When Empson wrote his most famous book, "Seven Types of Ambiguity," he was attempting to translate into literary criticism the ideas about the physical universe of the new physicists. One of his main influences was the physicist Paul Dirac.

A: Dirac was a very shy, rather artistic Englishman at Cambridge. He published a book, "Principles of Quantum Mechanics," with a sparse beauty and elegance. Dirac was like a Japanese painter, or a maker of Zen Buddhist proverbs, or koans.

When you read his book, it's like reading a great piece of poetry, like being in heaven and seeing all these beautiful forms.

Dirac produced the Dirac Equation, which led to the prediction of what's called antimatter. That is, you have an electron but you also have, like a mirror image, a positron. You have a proton, but you also have an antiproton. Although Dirac at first didn't realize what he had, what this equation had, it soon became clear what it meant.

With antimatter, if an antiparticle meets a particle, like an electron meets a positron, they totally annihilate into radiation. So, it's complete conversion of matter into energy.

You can see that these ideas that undermined the previous conceptions of matter and energy would lend themselves to an understanding of the kind of literary ambiguity I gather Empson talked about.

Q: Empson was also interested in Erwin Schrodinger.

A: Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg preceded Dirac. He summarized their work.

Schrodinger is one of the most interesting figures in all of science. He was a true Renaissance man, with a deep knowledge of eastern philosophy. He synthesized the ideas of Einstein, Bohr and another quantum physicist, Louis de Broglie.

With the Schrodinger Wave Equation, he more or less reconciled the phenomena of particles and waves, which had been seen as distinct, in a theory that accounted for both. This is one of the central quantum concepts. It was the birth of the modern quantum theory.

Q: It's interesting that you compare Dirac with Japanese poetry and that you mention Schrodinger's interest in eastern mysticism, because Empson went to China and Japan to work as an English professor, and he steeped himself in Asian culture.

A: In the new physics, just as we see the breakdown of the split between the two cultures, science and the humanities, we also see the split between West and East breaking down, with rationalism and mysticism reconciled, as well.

Q: So we see the two cultures really merging, with science more and more expressed in general, intellectual terms that are part of the broader modernist culture.

A: The figure with the most importance for this debate right now is the person Einstein himself considered his heir, David Bohm, who died in 1992.

Bohm is a remarkable personality. He started out at Berkeley with J. Robert Oppenheimer, in the 1940s. Bohm was one of those who was accused of being involved with the Soviets -- he was not allowed to work at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was created. But he was incredibly important for physics today and in the future.

Q: The partial opening of the Soviet archives and documentary disclosures by the U.S. government have revived the debate about the Oppenheimer circle, including Philip Morrison and Bohm. You knew Bohm in Britain?

A: Bohm took the fall for Oppenheimer, to protect Oppenheimer, and left the country in order not to have to testify. He went to Brazil and then to Israel for a bit and finally to England, where I found him, at the University of London. I believe Oppenheimer betrayed Bohm. Oppenheimer sacrificed Bohm to protect himself.

Q: Bohm sounds like a great California figure. He begins at Berkeley; he comes under a cloud because of his pro-Soviet associations. According to you, he ends up as the heir to Einstein, developing ideas that are extremely radical and relevant to the whole culture. What are those ideas?

A: Bohm was a student of Oppenheimer's. He was hired after the war, as a young assistant professor at Princeton. And he was assigned to teach the course in quantum theory, very much under the influence of Bohr. In his lectures, Bohm was a very thorough person. He really was questing, trying to understand the universe and quantum theory philosophically.

He always proceeded in a clear, intuitive way. He was trying to cut through the abstract mathematics and to make contact with reality. His lecture notes for his course at Princeton became his book, "Quantum Theory." It's beautifully written.

Q: I understand there was a famous encounter between Bohm and Einstein at Princeton.

A: Having finished writing his book, he was walking around the campus, and he ran into Einstein. Einstein had read the book, and they spent a weekend of intensive discussions.

Bohm had developed what's called the pilot wave theory, based on Einstein's ideas. The idea was that Bohr's quantum theory was very accurate, and you can do all kinds of practical and important technological things with it. But it's incomplete; it's leaving something essential out.

In classical physics, you have particles and force fields, electromagnetic fields, in space. Bohm added something new. He saw patterns, quantum patterns, like patterns of thought. Bohm showed that a "quantum pattern of active information" is fundamental to the universe. He deals with the parts of the uni verse and the whole of the universe, and he theorizes that things that look like separate parts of the universe emerge out of a pool, which he calls the common pool of information.

It's like the universe is a sea of information. And here the gap between the two cultures finally collapses altogether. Science and history, technology and intellect, all collapse into one. Because at the threshold of the 21st century, in what we call the information revolution, the information age, Bohm tells us that, in the end, the whole of reality is simply a pattern of information.

Nothing could be more revolutionary.


-- 1939: Born September 14, Brooklyn, N.Y. -- 1960: B.A. in physics, Cornell University. -- 1963: Publishes paper, "Quantum-Mechanical Correlation Theory of Electromagnetic Fields," in Nuovo Cimento, Journal of the Italian Physical Society. -- 1967: M.S. in physics, University of California at San Diego. Publishes paper, "The Goldstone Theorem in the Jahn-Teller Effect," with Marshall Stoneham, in Proceedings of the Physical Society of London and "Laser Self-Focusing Analogue to the Landau-Ginzburg Equation of Type II Superconductivity," in Physics Letters. -- 1967-71: Assistant professor of physics, San Diego State University. -- 1969: Ph.D in Physics, University of California at Riverside. -- 1970: Publishes paper, "Beyond the Hartree-Fock Theory in Superfluid Helium," with Fred Cummings, in Physica (Switzerland). -- 1971-72: Research fellow under David Bohm, Birkbeck College, University of London. -- 1974: Publishes paper, "The Dirac Equation and General Relativity," in Foundations of Physics. -- 1975: Co-author with Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben, "Space-Time and Beyond." -- 1991: Publishes paper, "Design for a Superluminal Communications Device," in Physics Essays (Toronto).