For around three decades now Carolyn and I have both been good friends with physicist and poet Nick Herbert, and we have long been inspired by his uniquely brilliant mind and wonderful creations.

Nick is famous for being able to make the difficult aspects of Quantum Physics understandable to the average person, and for integrating poetry with science. His popular book Quantum Reality remains a classic introduction to this often-bewildering science. Nick is also the author of Faster Than Light and Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness and the New Physics, which stretch concepts and insights from physics into exciting new arenas of thought.

Nick holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics from Stanford University, and he has taught science at all levels, from graduate school to kindergarten. As a physicist, Nick devised the shortest proof of Bell’s interconnectedness theorem to date, and as a part of Berkeley’s revolutionary collective of young physicists, The Fundamental Fysiks Group, during the 1970s, his work was essential to the development of Quantum Physics, as described in David Kaiser’s book How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.

Nick has also been interested in the fringe areas of science, and he once constructed a "Metaphase Typewriter," a "quantum operated" device whose purpose was "to communicate with disembodied spirits.” Then, on the hundredth anniversary of Harry Houdini’s birth, Nick and colleagues made an attempt to communicate with the late magician’s spirit using this device. Did Houdini send the message “In an infinite time” that Nick and his colleagues received via quantum processes linked to the communication device?

Nick was the co-coordinator of the Esalen Institute’s Physics and Consciousness program, and he has led many workshops there on the quantum mechanics of everyday life. Nick is also a wonderfully creative poet, and we participated in some great poetry readings together in Boulder Creek, California years ago. Some of Nick’s collected poetry can be found in his books Physics on All Fours and Harlot Nature.

For Carolyn’s book The Alchemy of Possibility, which I wrote the introduction for, Nick wrote, Modeled after the Chinese Book of Changes, part lyric, part divinatory, it invites encounter, points out paths and encourages the reader to plug his or her antennas into the flow.”

I interviewed Nick in 1989 for my book Mavericks of the Mind, which also contains my interview with Carolyn. Nick has a warm spirit and a beautiful heart.

Here are some excerpts from my conversations with him:

David: How has your study of quantum physics influenced your understanding of what consciousness is?

Nick: I feel that quantum physics is one side of consciousness, it’s the material manifestation of consciousness. Quantum physicists are basically describing something that’s conscious, and the inside of quantum physics is what we experience as awareness. I mean, this notion of potentia becoming actual, doesn’t that sound like what goes on in your mind?

David: Yes. So then do you think it’s possible for consciousness to exist without a physical container, so to speak?

Nick: Yes, in a sense. But I don’t think it’s possible for our type of consciousness to exist without matter around. But it needn’t be this kind of matter in your brain. Different minds, different highs. The kind of practice we humans know about is taking possibilities and making them actual. You’ve got to have a universe to make them actual in. So we probably need matter then. It seems that our kind of consciousness and matter are inseparable. So that when I die, probably most of my consciousness dies with me, because it’s an interaction between the big mind, the big possibilities, and the small range of possibilities allotted to human bodies. But I may change my mind. I’ve been reading Ian Stevenson’s book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, where little kids, when they begin to talk, say, “You’re not my mother and dad. My parents live in this other town about four miles away.” Then they begin giving details about who their brothers and sisters are...

...The Pleasure Dome Project... It’s to take the metaphor of inner space seriously— that there is an Inner space, and that for some reason, some accident of biology and evolution, each of us is restricted to this tiny little cave in inner space. But there’s this vast area that we could explore, including telepathic union with other caves, and even going into other non-human areas of mind. To me, quantum physics suggests this— that there is this potentia out there which we could basically surf. We do play with a little bit of it each day, but we could probably expand the area of possibility further. It’s like we’re living in a little tiny bay, and we could go out into the ocean. That’s the possibility, I think, that quantum physics suggests to me. That someday we’ll be able to go outside our own little bays, and go out into the great ocean of mind. ...surfing in the quantum sea.

by David Jay Brown