What does Robert Anton Wilson have to do with the 2022 Nobel Prize?

How a far-out underground writer like RAW scooped every other writer on Quantum Entanglement!

Over the course of researching and writing Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson I sought to trace the various intellectual trajectories that Wilson enthusiastically envisaged over the course of his life. Wilson had a journalistic habit of finding the scoop across the cultural spectrum, on both the political realm, through his profile pieces on Madalyn Murray O’Hair, of course the literary realm, and also the realm of science. This is exemplified in his book Cosmic Trigger vol. 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati when he presented the most current experiments in the field, specifically through his brief discussion of the work of John Clauser and Alain Aspect.

In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three experimental researchers who spent their career testing the work of the physicist John Bell. John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger’s reception of the most prestigious prize in science has provided the institutional mark of distinction. Quantum Entanglement, or Non-Locality, is now all the rage in Physics, but there was a time when the study of it was considered fringe, weird, and a waste of time.[i] According to MIT professor David Kaiser’s book How the Hippies Saved Physics it was a ragtag bunch of far out Berkeley physicists in the mid-70s that are single-handily responsible for today’s second quantum revolution. (The first quantum revolution gave birth to transistors and lasers. Today, thanks to Entanglement, we are entering the world of Quantum Computing and much else.) Of the three winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize, John Clauser was one of the wild-eyed “hippies” in the Berkeley area in the mid-seventies. He represents a whole community of physicists and researchers who brought philosophy back into physics. It is no surprise then that Robert Anton Wilson was in the mix.

According to Saul-Paul Sirag, Quantum Physicist, writer, and close friend of Wilson’s during the 1970s, Wilson was “the first” popular writer to properly explain the results of the experiments by John Clauser and Alain Aspect.[ii] When Sirag told me this, I thought it was worthwhile to look at that chart Wilson published in Cosmic Trigger vol 1, where he explained the current state of Entanglement theory and experiments as of 1976. Sirag told me that it was he who first provided Wilson the chart in ‘76. However, RAW added his own literary flare through his discussion the chart in his mind bending 1977 classic.

Again, according to Sirag, Wilson had provided the most up-to-date research in Quantum Entanglement studies in the form of a book aimed at popular reading audiences. RAW had the scoop! Before Gary Zukav wrote about Dancing Wu-Li Masters (1979) and the plethora of books that followed after, Wilson was the first to accurately discuss the experiment that won the 2022 Nobel Prize.

In 1976, Wilson spoke at a workshop produced by the Physics/Consciousness Research Group, whose core members were Sarfatti, Wolf, and Sirag. The event was held at Pajero Dunes, and Wilson spoke about Leary’s 24 “slots” of personality, which was an early model for what became commonly known as the 8-circuit model of intelligence. [iii] Somewhere around that time, Sirag gave Wilson a copy of the chart, which explained the most interesting interpretations of the results of Bell’s Theorem.

One of the great things about Wilson’s work was his adroit discussions of Quantum Physics, mostly Entanglement, in such a way that physicist John Gribbin was convinced RAW was a physicist himself. To the value of his readers Wilson’s discussion of very dense scientific concepts provided a launching pad with which to engage with Quantum Physics. Wilson speculated wildly in Cosmic Trigger vol. 1 about the roots of the experience he had during his residency in “Chapel Perilous.” His discussion of the intersections between psychedelic experiences, depth psychology, and magick, syncopated well with such concepts as Superluminal Communication, or faster-than-light communication, or Superluminal Information Transfer, is just one reason why Cosmic Trigger vol 1 is such a classic. However, much like the hippies who saved physics, Wilson’s achievement in providing the first presentation of Clauser and Aspect’s experiments, I think, has not yet been properly acknowledged.

Sirag and Wilson’s chart provides an amazing map to dig deep into. The chart flows chronologically from left to right on the page, beginning with the first quantum revolution. Some major breakthroughs in all that began when Max Planck was hired by a German light company to make a better light bulb! Then Einstein in 1905 discovered the photoelectric effect which forwarded the notion of light as Quanta, or quanta of particles of light were then referred to as photons. More discoveries were made!

But then after 30 years of mind-blowing experiments one followed by another, Einstein tried to stop to the madness with his, and Rosen and Podolsky’s, EPR Paradox. Although Einstein helped conceive the basic concept, he was never satisfied with Quantum Mechanics. Einstein’s disappointment with The Copenhagen Interpretation and their prevailing view of reality was that it failed in the task of natural science. The goal of natural science is to provide significant aspects of nature that are independent of observers or their observations. Instead, QM was only focusing on measurements. The theory did not have anything to say about what was likely to be true in the absence of observation. That there could be laws only when one looked, and no laws when one wasn’t looking marked QM anti-realist.

This is where Bell’s Theorem comes in. John Bell’s 1964 mathematical demonstration showed that if Quantum Mechanics is valid then any two particles once in contact will continue to influence each other, no matter how far apart they may move. This violates special relativity, unless the influence between the particles is not employing any known energy.

The structure of Bell’s proof was its assumption that a local reality exists. With some arithmetic Bell showed that this locality assumption leads directly to a certain inequality. [iv] Whenever these experiments are done, they violate Bell’s Inequality. Hence the local-reality assumption is mistaken, meaning any reality that violates the EPR experiment must be Non-Local. A Non-Local Interaction jumps from body A to body B without touching anything in between. With observations like that Wilson would later make claims that things like Voodoo injury was an example of a non-local interaction.

Before moving further into the chart, I’d like to circle back to the experiment that kicked off the Quantum madness to begin with. Fundamentally, Quantum Physics begins with the study of light, and the search for a better light bulb! In 1894, Max Planck was hired by the German Bureau of Standards to help design a better carrier of light. In a series of experiments that followed, Planck investigated the qualities of heat, energy, and light. Planck assumed that light doesn’t move in a continuous wave, but in packets, or Quanta and these Quanta are uniquely and mathematically proportional to a given frequency. This means that certain frequencies only hold certain amounts of energy. That new understanding of packets described a new physics — i.e., Quantum Mechanics. Albert Einstein, who in 1905 published his paper on the Photo Electric Effect — which happens when light is shone on a metal surface and electrons are given enough energy to escape — was also studying light. Using Planck’s formula, Einstein proposed that only certain wavelengths can release enough electrons regardless of light intensity. Therefore, light energy is emitted in wave packets, or photons. This discovery gave birth to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Following the chart, Wilson next provides three possibilities for “reality,” based off the results of Bell’s Theorem. For years, the experiments of Clauser (The “Diminished effect”) and Aspect (the “Non-Instantaneous effect”) were two of the most curious when I first read about them in Cosmic Trigger vol. 1

So, what did Clauser and Aspect, and later Zeilinger’s do in their experiments?

Clauser built an apparatus that emitted two entangled photons at a time. Both were shot at a filter which tested their polarization. After this experiment, Clauser observed some “loopholes,” areas where a Hidden Variable could still affect the outcome of the experiment. One example was his positioning of the filters he used in his experiment were positioned at fixed angles and this was not the best thing. That’s where Alain Aspect comes in. He sought to build an apparatus that would close the loopholes of Clauser’s experiment. To do this he was able to position the filters at different angles and was able to detect more photons, which provided more accurate set of measurements. Aspect’s experiments provided evidence that Quantum Mechanics is correct and that there are no Hidden Variables. Many years later, Anton Zeilinger and his team added more to Clauser and Aspect’s experiments with his own. He created entangled pairs of photons by shining a laser on a special crystal and then used random numbers to shift between measure settings, resulting in even more accurate measurements of the phenomenon. All three experiments have led to what’s now referred to as the “second quantum revolution.” The first brought humanity transistors and lasers. The second is manifesting quantum computing, quantum encryption, and other developments that will ensure a very weird future.

[i] Today Bells’ Theorem has accumulated more than 3,200 citations in professional scientific literature. It is the centerpiece of everything from quantum computing to quantum encryption, to quantum teleportation.

[ii] “Bob’s descriptions of these ideas were as correct as could be (in the 1970s) without going into the mathematical equations of QM.” Quote from Saul-Paul Sirag.

[iii] Wilson later wrote up an article about the event, which appeared in Berkeley Barb titled, “Scientists Confess Strange Encounters.”

[iv] Saul-Paul Sirag broke down Bell’s theorem to me like this. “Bell’s Theorem entails Bell’s inequality. This is a mathematical statement. One version is: –2 < S < 2, where S is the sum of photons detected (at the same instant) at two detector sites. The photons pass through polarizers at each site. These polarizers can be set at various angles. There is a coincidence counter that keeps track of the coincidences that occur as the polarizers are rotated through various angles. The inequality is meant to test whether the photon coincidences obey the Cosine Squared law predicted by QM. This Cosine is with respect to the angle between the two polarizers. If the experiment obeys the Cosine Squared law, then Bell’s inequality (as written above) will be violated.”

Works Cited:

1. Kaiser, David. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. 1st ed, W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2012.

2. Kennedy, Gabriel Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. Media Heist Publications, 2024.

3. Sirag, Saul-Paul. Interviews with the author.

4. Wilson, Robert Anton. Cosmic Trigger vo. 1. New Falcon Press. 1977.

5. Wilson, Robert Anton. “Scientists Confess Strange Encounters.” Berkeley Barb. July 9-15, 1976, pg. 6-7