Radical New Nuclear Options

Because the positive need for new nuclear technology is now growing fast, even as the risks also grow... and because our life expectancies are allever more unpredictable... I have decided to just write down now a few of the most important little known nuclear technologies I have learned about, relevant to the life-threatening global strategic situation https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/04/from-golden-dome-to-new-jerusalem.html .

Background

First, some background on the larger strategic picture in physics. A rational global strategy, aimed at maximizing the probability of humanity surviving this century, would of course not call for a "silver bullet." Like the "spiral development" strategies which John Mankins brilliantly expounded to his review panels when he ran HR&T ( a billions-dollars efforts at NASA under Bush)... it calls for parallel tracks, connected somewhat but each focused in a very strategic way on its own.

 

The Golden Dome technology is one of several reasons why we need a very strong stream of effort to "FIX QED" -- to develop all the more advancedmodels needed for electronic and photonic systems, like the program I developed and led at NSF before my retirement (https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.33, like what we now know about the level of consciousness we see in mammal brains (werbos and Davis), and like the many supporting papers for my patents

( https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3310 ) some of which are still private, held by several of us.

But we ALSO need a parallel, less open effort to "ADD A NUCLEAR COMPONENT TO THE RESULTING THEORY OF PHYSICS, AND IMPLEMENT THE MULTIPRONGED SPIRAL DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP TO THE FULLEST GOLDEN DOME OPTIONS." 

This entails building on the full foundation of crossdisciplinary resources summarized in the books https://photos.app.goo.gl/qAy8giPzEjp1tZkj9. Of course, this email cannot review all of these and their relevant connections, though I hope someone does someday, and I hope I can help.

A few key points --

When I got my PhD decades ago at Harvard, the common view was: "We now know the true Lagrangian which controls the universe, except for how we connect to gravity. It is defined by the standard model of physics' explained as electroweak theory (EWT) combined with Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), as defined in the official 

standard text by Weinberg [shown in that photo album], but with gravity somewhat LIKE Einstein's General Relativity (GR) but something we are working on.) QED is a well known well-proven limit case of EWT; it was invented by Feynmann, Schwinger and Tomonoga."

BUT -- I took my main courses in quantum field theory from Schwinger, whose group I stayed connected with. Feynmann and Schwinger both agreed that the canonical quantum field theory they invented was NOT CREDIBLE, and should be seen only as a place holder. I could say a LOT more...

but for now: EWT and QED do have a huge empirical foundation, which Schwinger added to far beyond what Feynmann ever learned about. nanohub.org contains great tutorials on subjects like NEGF, developed by Schwinger and extended very far by many people in electronics and photonics. It is fully consistent with the David Deutsch extended version of QED which is what he used whne he invented the modernn quantum Tyring machine, almost the only form of quantum computing known even now to most people in that field. But does not fit the foundations given in Weinberg's text. 

 

Schwinger did great work in QED, in QMHP... BUT HE ALSO DID WORK ON NUCLEAR INTERACTIONS.

Breakthroughs

I do not have this until this afternoon (at the earliest) to get deep enough even to the basics here.

BUt...

Schwinger did not believe QCD.

When I read his paper, A Magnetic Model of Matter, in Science, I was startled by the implications, but I wondered: could this be true? What is the evidence?

I worked hard, at hard core highest NSF standards, to evaluate the issue. I collected many papers, all included in my directories which I have  loaned to a few of you to copy. I was startled to see the evidence -- while incomplete -- strongly favored his views (at least in basic concepts included in his models) over QCD. Above all -- evidence indicated that the strong nuclear force is (can sometimes be) a LONG RANGE FORCE.

As a sanity check (part of the NSF tradition of CHECKING), I discussed with the empirical nuclear physicist Tetsuo Sawada of Japan. Many of his papers and our joint papers are in those folders.

When Pons and Fleischmann reported their work...

Schwinger dug VERY deep, and so did I. It changes the models a bit... but there is new empirical evidence from Japan, some even discussed in LENR conferences which Denis Bushnell, Chief Scientist of Langley, encouraged. They clearly imply nuclear transmutation, new energy sources, violation of baryon number conservation... I promised Teller and Schwinger I would cooperate with the new efforts to suppress such UNTIL HUMANITY IS READY OR UNTIL THE NEEDS OUTWEIGH THE RISKS.

Japan was ready and able to start producing the systems not so long ago. My files also point to other competent suppliers, fortunately not highlighted in the LENR conferences.

There is an obvious analogy to fusion -- an energy barrier which appears insuperable, but can be overcome by a laser. Such lasers are now closer at hand, and I even funded projects at NSF which develop necessary enabling technologies. (My papers citing Glauber and Sudarshan certainly give foundations of how advanced lasers work.)

BUT the nanopatterned devices are a better hope for now. The only POSITIVE value for knowing the real Lagrangian (better describing strong nuclear interactions) is to help in THAT kind of design, which would require help from folks like Stan Williams of Texas A&M (totally QED, but the same kind of math needed).

Or folks like quantum dot array designers. Also relevant are the nonlinear electric/optic crystals used by Leitenstorfer and those who cite him. 

Best of luck,

  Paul   

On Fri, Jun 20, 2025 at 3:49 PM Paul Werbos <pwerbos@gmail.com> wrote:

Last week, I was hoping for a chance to visit someone in reach of me by Washington Metro, to give them a "brain dump" on "existential"

nuclear variables which in my view are crucial to future possibilities,

(It is odd how France24 used the word "existential" at exactly the moment I was typing it. There are connections. A major goal would be to pass on information crucial to implementing https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/04/from-golden-dome-to-new-jerusalem.html .)

I have mentioned how Ed Teller and Juian SChwinger both came to me, during my first years at NSF, and declared: (1) they could tell I was catching on to physics they knew, supported by new empirical work, which would threaten the very existence of our species if made public under the political conditions of the time;

(2) they asked me to help them keep it deeply quiet, until and unless conditions warrant a change in strategy. Conditions HAVE changed... NOT enough to make me trust email or video calls for the details, but enough for a brain dump, TO people I would trust in a place I would trust. (There are many such in the DC area,

but I will never forget my visit long ago to the "Star Wars" Headquarters in Crystal City, where the head of the place Janis (sp?) told me to expect our conversations to be overheard by  folks who also shared the technology of monitoring vibrations of windows.)  

Absent such an option now, at a time of some urgency, I am thinking of breaking down and documenting some things by internet. Even as Trump meditates on  what to do next, so too do I.

When and How can we just leave it in the hands of God?

A friend worries that we may have to leave some things in the hands of God. This certainly resonates with a core aspect of my own thinking, at a time when the challenges before nus are overwhelming. But to think rationally about that aspect , we need to sharpen our vision of "What IS God?" 

A higher intelligence we are connected to?

Low as we are compared to all that exists, there are many intelligences higher than us. Fuzzy or fanciful pantheism is not so clear as picking a few to pay most attention to. 

For me  right now  I focus most on a kind of great trinity: (1) the universe itself; (2) the full noosphere organism of our solar system; and (3) my wife. Only (1) is in any sense omniscient. I struggle hard every week to better understand and better connect to all three.

I bcc the friend who recommended Jung's red book to me. I now refer to it as "my New testament", the closest I have to a second trusted holy book. "God" 2 often reflects what Jung calls "the spirit of the times". Jung's experience of the complexity of real life in the 1920s and later is relevant to what WE are facing now, though the challenges have all grown much greater. Our connections with higher intelligence are all two way connections, giving us ever more responsibilities, unless we choose just to fold and rest in peace, or dig a hole to hide in -- which is familiar to all higher intelligences and which they will accommodate with grace and sadness.

How mathematics is the highest priority in healing humanity

 First, definition and background:

I now believe that the entire human species is at risk of going extinct in this century, for reasons discussed in my recent paper for Yeshua and Carey on issues of great importance to it. (I also worry about issues in the next century, related to what caused decline and fall of human civilizations in dozens of cases in the past millennia, but this email will not discuss those, except implicitly at the end.)

The most obvious threads of the future killing us all involve issues like nuclear war, with AGI and drones and new aerospace technology easy to see on the horizon. 

Months ago, I would have said that the threat of such new levels of warfare is basically a psychological breakdown in our collective intelligence, like the collective intelligence studied most deeply by Carl Jung. (I refer to the collective intelligence of earth or of our solar system as our "noosphere.") I felt that the deep schism which most needed healing is the schism between belief in science/reality and belief in some sort of anti-realistic version of religion. I could imagine wars spearheaded by power-hungry priest king rulers and by ferocious armies of spiritually dead, obedient coders.

THOSE risks are very serious, and anyone with a real sense of reality will always remain aware of them.

HOWEVER... THIS MONTH... after probing more deeply into what might save or destroy human nations and organizations... and the concrete details in https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/04/from-golden-dome-to-new-jerusalem.html, I now see it differently, "ON THE GROUND" at the front lines.

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Second, how I see it now:

I have at times said the one true "God", the intelligent personality which rules everything in this universe, is the universe itself. https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/08/debate-on-god-with-irish-scientist.html

Most people hearing those words would assume this is an insult to God, but that is because they do not really understand how nonlinear dynamical systems governed by 3+1-D Lagrange-Euler equations fully embody the highest attributes of "intelligence" like what we see in mammal brains, but higher.

BUT OUR NOOSPHERE IS NOT THAT HIGH!!! (The blog post says more.) 

My concern NOW: OUR noosphere, a great collective intelligence, reminds me of the use of brain modeling, as explained in my chapter published in Come Carpentier's book (draft attached). We are all part of the local collective intelligence, but IT is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, any more than any of us is. (Nor are Jehovah or Santa Claus or Jesus or Krishna or Odin or the REFLECTION of Amaterasu we saw in the muddy mirror pool we saw in Izumo, Japan). Our noosphere is like an adolescent girl, who has just spent a billion years cleaning out the stinkiest poisonous toilets you could image (how the oceans were, see Hazen's videos on the history of life on earth) and is just now beginning to experience technologies never seen before by us earth creatures. HER life (or its life or his life) is very much in danger right now, and she is undergoing a mental struggle (like the struggles some adolescents experience when sent to new schools).. which she and we may or may not survive.

HOWEVER:

"God" has much more knowledge than that to draw on, the entire universe.

And, since "God" is basically a set of nonlinear PDE... "His" native language is mathematics, a more universal language, not English or Sanskrit or Hebrew or whatnot. 

He/she/it can appreciate the NEED for mathematics to implement the "New Jerusalem" kind of technologies mentioned in that blog post. UNLIKE our local noosphere, which is drowning in incoherent misunderstandings of simple basics like reality and the limits of all finite minds, and the equivalences between what kinds of patterns can emerge or be built using silicon versus carbon versus other elements. OR the need to really "see the sky" to have much chance of survival. 

As I probe these kinds of thoughts floating around human cultures and leaders... I am reminded again of the more ancient (and less fundamentally corrupted/biased) thoughts of the shamanic people who try to connect to "Mother Earth" and "Father Sky" (or vice-versa). Should I even retrieve my photo from the island in the center of Lake Titicacca, showing the meeting place of the trails leading up to "pachamamma" and "pachatatta"? They are not enemies, BUT perhaps the conflict between key visions THEY possess are a more important schism than the one I was most worried about last year. The deep understanding and use of the more mathematical perspective is a key target for the kind of healing needed to save us... even in this century!

The key point is that better "seeing the sky," INTEGRATING what we see with new scientific instruments WITH first person experience AND with our connection to the noosphere itself, is essential to healing our noosphere enough to understand and survive what is "out there" in all directions.

By the way, some in the BPM list have said "But what of  molecules?" That too fits the Approximation4 paper, and is related to the new existential threats of the coming century, above and beyond the obvious ones in this century. 

On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 10:06 PM 'Howard Bloom' via Scientific Council of the Alt Planetary Futures Institute (Ap-Fi) <scientific-council-Iof-the-alt-planetary-futures-institute-ap-fi@googlegroups.com> wrote:

victor, you are right.  our living in the world experience must be part of our science.

the first two laws of science, the laws that grabbed my soul when i was ten years old, are:

1. the truth at any price, including the price of your life; and
2. look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, then proceed from there.

science is an aspiration to omniscience.  to achieve its goals it must look at the lens of emotion and the infrastructures of habit that determine how we see our world.  science must comprehend the selves below the floorboards of the self.

with warmth and oomph--howard

From Golden Dome to New Jerusalem: Breakthroughs Now Available

 When Trump declared he would support a "Golden Dome" thrust developing the most advanced breakthroughs now on the horizon, able to stop murderous missile attacks anywhere on Earth.. I was excited at first. But when he turned it over to Musk, I remembered how many other great thrusts Musk has worked on which fell short, because Musk is not keeping up with the best available advanced technology.

ALSO... In June, 2023, in the first UN Security Council session on AI, representatives of the great powers (except Russia and China, abstaining) all agreed that the number one need for humanity, for the sake of global security, is a new global warning system open to all nations on earth, to warn them when and where they are being attacked, if and when it happens. (After all, sheer confusion about who attacked whom was a major cause of World War I.) We need a new GLOBAL system to "see the sky," especially -- the first of the list of new technologies I advocate. 

I call this list the "New Jerusalem" list, because, when I first received information about them, I was amazed at how many of them match real, new technologies I recognized when I saw them in the Book of Revelations, when I read it for the first time, locked up in an apartment in Dupont Circle when visiting Washington DC.  I would do my best to help get any ONE of them deployed, though my highest hope would be for a space habitat in geosynchronous orbit actually over Jerusalem proper. 

A quick list would be:

1. ABSOLUTE priority, extending the UN discussion for which I sent you the link: "seeing the sky," which is itself a portfolio.

My recent patent https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos included several papers filed at USPTO not published yet (to my surprise!). The key point is that a new type of quantum information processing, based on the same physics as the standard Quantum Turing Machine (invented by David Deutsch of Oxford) but radically different in capability and architecture, gives order of magnitude in all image processing tasks, including "seeing the sky" either just overhead or deep into the universe. 

It builds on work I funded at NSF by David Hyland, which later became classified after NASA and DOD used that same technology to achieve higher resolution on earth. I was allowed to see follow-ons AFTER China also achieved high resolution in seeing the earth -- but this new technology is also crucial to more intelligent USE of high resolution databases. I often cite China and Israel as world leaders in such aspects, in neural networks based on classical physics, but the quantum one is orders of magnitude beyond that.

All of this "sees" light (electromagnetic radiation), but the same design could be connected to new sensor networks focused on nuclear force signatures, which certainly cry out for further development, on an urgent basis.   [SEE  APPENDIX B FOR SOME TECHNICAL DETAILS ON HOW TO DO THIS.]

If humanity were truly deep enough with enough collective intelligence, we would give the highest priority to build such open international sensor networks, building on electromagnetic sensing but moving strategically to "see the sky" (and see our own solar system) for nuclear forces, with the highest possible resolution. This would require

a better understanding of the underlying Lagrangian, which I discussed with people like Schwinger and Teller when I was at NSF ( 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391442087_Proposal_for_a_Theory_of_Everything) and new empirical work making better use of nanopatterned heterostructures, with alternating planes in design. 

2. High power Intelligent Guidance Navigation and Control (IGNC). This includes how we steer an interceptor vehicle to destroy an attacking missile or drone. You know that "iron dome" technology is an important tool preventing total disaster in Israel, but few people know the full history. We should get into details at some time. Long ago, Patriot missiles became very famous, back when their success rate was only 1 or 4% .

I had many connections to BMDO and USAF and Boeing, from my program at NSF. 

I funded one of my PIs, Balakrishnan of U-Missouri Rolla (Now MST), who passed "shoot out" competitors, which led to a partnership with Lockheed and a ten-fold improvement in reducing failure to intercept.  But Lockheed never deployed the stage two version, which would have reduced failures by another factor of ten, simply because they did not have an economic incentive. Bala is dead now, but (1) the stage 2 design is fully understand by his research group leader, who is now in Bangalore, India; (2) the new quantum version of the algorithm will give orders of magnitude improvement, and important qualitative improvements. 

IGNC can be used EITHER on interceptor vehicles, OR on directed energy weapons.  

3.  Low cost access to space, far beyond what Lockheed or Musk know about. In building a space habitat, or even just deploying interceptors, cost per kg to LEO or GEO are of central importance to what can be built. I was delighted to read that Jewell of Purdue, Trump's nominee for S&T head of DOD, has a strong background in hypersonics with some background to good old pre-corruption Boeing engineering. This is a huge topic... but in brief, Musk has his own very narrow stable, and we have LOTS of data on what makes him so far behind what China and others know. I was one of three frontline

USGOV funding agents who funded work aimed at understanding very advanced hypersonic work leaking out long ago from Russia. I am still in regular contact with people from DARPA, AF and BMDO, which could assist a New Jerusalem project get us orders of magnitude more than what Musk could get.

 

4. New electrooptic crystals to be made in space. This is one of the two "OLD" breakthrough options! I will never forget 1972 when I accidentally read the Book of Revelations ( a story which might amuse you, but for later), and saw what crystals were displayed in the space habitat depicted in that book (named "New Jerusalem"). Most were easy to understand for me... getting a PhD then in the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, but one puzzled me. I had a classmate from GE Aerospace, and I asked him what THIS crystal would be good for. He was shocked 

and promised me that GE could get every copy of the book removed from circulation, whatever it was! I just laughed... but later learned that that kind of nonlinear photonic crystal is fundamental to starting quantum nonlinear optics. There is also a similar nonlinear electro-optic crystal whose capabilities go beyond what almost anyone knows as yet. (There was a group by Lake Konstanz in Switzerland with amazing results; on a recent web search, I learned of quantum computing work in Japan almost unknown in US which verifies the startling new results.)

5. New energy sources and detection. This has a link to 1, but is the least proven of all five so far. Circa 1990, when Julian Schwinger visited me at NSF, he described new empirical work already done strongly supporting his general claim, published in Science (A Magnetic Model of Matter), supporting a family of Hamiltonians quite different from the usual QCD, which we may now have a need for. See https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.aac9788 for a family on nonlinear electric/photonic crystals which need to be studied much more exhaustively because of their potential both in "seeing the sky" in new dimensions, and energy sources which might change the game. 

6. MORE CLASSICAL... large AI servers of any kind need power. From our IEEE climate technology work, we know of high  efficiency Brayton-based 

solar thermal energy, and thermal storage, ready for more immediate deployment both on earth and in space. It is SO well proven and developed already... but vested interests in the energy sector have had huge biasing effects, weakening the US. If Project Golden Dome, mutated into New Jerusalem, could just get this piece deployed, it would be worth more than the entire life's product of >99% of people in these fields!

As I type this, I note that Abdul Kalam's proposal to use solar sail mirrors to create zones of high illumination on earth could be combined with the new solar technology, which is described in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14JNhumdUGzAkoOadlXiR1fqE79WPOLsL?usp=sharing, to possibly produce renewable clean electricity on earth at a cost many times lower than  any alternatives in sight. 

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Appendix A:

In the original email, I said I was leaving out many details (all filled in in my files, too long for one email)

BUT ALSO some related topics.

One topic is the place of our life -- the life of this solar system -- in the much larger ecosystem of our universe,

discussed a bit more in my chapter in https://www.amazon.in/Exploring-Consciousness-Non-Locality-Come-Carpentier/dp/9391759947 . When a space enthusiast asked me what the chances are of our descendants 

reaching out beyond the solar system and establishing a stable existence there... I replied that it depends on an equilibrium probability distribution, which I derived and published in a paper in the con-mat part of arxiv. In practice, it depends on what kinds of sources of free energy we can use. That is not easy. The New Jerusalem proposal in motivated in great part, underneath, by the hope of making it possible. 

Appendix B: Seeing the Sky in Nuclear Bands

In truth, I now give this task a higher priority than all the others combined, simply because I know how it interacts with the others and with many complex threads into the future.

To make it real has three main parallel requirements:

(1) To fully implement quantum cognitive prediction, a key part of the patent already granted, as suggested by the paper of Hyland and Werbos, and further work in our folders, such as the paper now under submission by Christopher Werbos quantifying some of the benefits to nonconvex optimization going well beyond the papers already available in our files;

(2) A new Lagrangian function, as needed to fill in the complete new foundation of physics (Hard Core Einsteinian Realism HCER), especially to unify and fix the treatment of strong and weak nuclear forces, important to design of

more advanced sensor devices;

and (3) A vast new experimental database exploring what can be done, near nuclear sources of many kinds, near and near, using 2-D nanopatterned surfaces for sensing, using many types of heterostructure materials.

Task 3 reminds me of an "EFRI topic" proposed soon before my last year at NSF (2015), on "graphene plus," things that can be done with 2D nanopatterned sheets, related to the quantum dots part of a comprehensive DOE review of hardware options for quantum computing, in our folders. In truth, it also reminds me of those episodes of the 20-episode Chinese TV series on The THree Body Problem," where they hint at what can be done with "nanoblade technology," but simple 2D arrays in quantum dot televisions also show how much richness is there -- both for sensing and for actuation. INPUTTING such rich data to very powerful cognitive prediction may help us notice, see and use patterns we had not seen before, on earth and in sky. 

Regarding (2) -- at researchgate, I posted a paper Ouroboros4 FROM 2017, which may or may not demand upgrading based on our folders on topological solitons of various types. In an ideal world, I would be happy to transfer ALL the relevant files (circa 1-2 terabyte) to a stable secure UN site where they would be open to the world. 

IN FACT... Task (2) reminds me of an important episode in the life of Einstein, which I have studied rather deeply

in some directions.  I was rightly asked today: "SINCE you believe people must learn to crawl first, before they can stand, walk, run and fly.... YOUR Lagrangian is like standing. WHY are you making the same mistake Einstein made, devoting his later life to getting the Lagrangian right (in his case, the choice of metric in Riemannian geometry), BEFORE crucial basics which can be used even in the realm of quantum electrodynamics (QED)?"

And so, my new paper in JCER CITES my crucial earlier work on mappings (like extended Galuber-Sudarshan, published but also in arxiv) which solved the FIRST problem which Einstein left to Von Neumann, Wiener, Wigner and others, which they did not solve. I did because of my access... to newer work, but I owe the world a paper on that story someday. THAT mapping, PLUS the new Lagrangian, are the foundations which can get usback to reality, just as Einstein asked for, BEFORE he veered off into alternate geometries for which there is still no evidence of a need. 

How Freud Gave Us Backpropagation and Links to Jung

Long ago, IEEE gave me its Neural Network Pioneer award for the original discovery of backpropagation -- the main foundation of the deep learning sweeping the world today, which was transferred and disseminated only because of very great efforts over many years. However, only recently have psychiatrists and psychologists started to learn the true story -- how I derived backpropagation BY translating certain ideas from Freud into mathematics. Here is part of that story. I wrote it down when asked for a discussion of it... ===================================================== Direct human contact, even by Zoom, allows a depth and richness I value a LOT. However, when I worked at NSF (1988-2015), I also learned how some conversations can go off course, and generate misunderstandings and false memories. IN THIS CASE, I feel it calls for me to put certain facts on "paper" now, as a kind of foundation, reality testing, whatever. Also, to be honest, I strongly believe I reach higher levels of awareness in the early morning, on most days, before I get distracted by many other things. Over time, I have gotten VERY deep into many approaches to psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The first big step for me was when I was 7 or 8 years old,when my sent me to a summer camp, Long Acres, where I met George Davis Gammon ("Davis"), whose father was chairman of neurology (they said) at the University of Pennsylvania. When I turned 9 (1956), I entered Chestnut Hill Academy, located in northwest Philadelphia, where Davis was in my class, living near the school. In the many, many conversations we had, he passed on what his father and other family members had taught him about psychology and psychiatry, mainly from a Freudian point of view. He showed me Gray's anatomy and the book by Sherrington on the brain. I pored over Sherrington, but for anatomy and physiology I mainly studied a text my mother had used when she took nursing many years before that. In those days, everyone I knew was aware of Freud, but feelings were very polarized. (As they are today about many topics!) I had an image of young girls who would violently tease boys about how confused and distorted their thinking was. (I did not even think at the time that there might be a friendly aspect of such teasing. But I was never teased that way, so I did not think of that aspect.) IN FACT -- at age 8 I was injected with testosterone by a Dr. Bone (just a precaution, he said), and that, combined with normal stuff, put me on the extreme side of yang. Like many other yang boys, I was disgusted and repelled by a lot of what people said about Freud, and I was aiming for a logical mathematical understanding of brains, mind and universe, which tends to make people too disgusted by what was said about Freud to pay much attention. However -- thanks in part to what I learned from Davis, and from conversations with people like my sister's classmates... I decided to take a third path. I UNDERSTOOD the first basic concepts of Freud's theory of pyschodynamics, based on his studies of neurons in medical school. I understood the idea "if there is a forwards association from A to B, based on causal learning, there will be a corresponding flow BACKWARDS from the B neuron to the A neuron, for chemicals representing 'cathexis' or 'psychic energy.'" Instead of rejecting Freud as nonscientific, I decided to translate his idea from a bgroping effort to develop a mathematical theory by Freud, into real mathematics. That was just the START of a rather complex journey -- as the brain and mind are also complicated. In the early 1960s, I took advanced computer summer course for high school students at the Moore school of University of Pennsylvania, which led to a summer job in 1964 at a research project under Dr./Prof. Karreman, a cardiologist. He had me study Hebb's classic book, still important, The Organization of Behavior. As I pondered Hebb's ideas for a universal learning rule, I realized quickly it could not even do as well as simple linear regression in learning how the world works; for a mathematically viable design, I needed derivatives, and by then I simply knew the relation between Freud and how to calculate derivatives, a kind of childhood memory by then. FINALLY -- a decent documentary record of sorts: https://vixra.org/abs/1902.0046 from 1972. SO much happened related to this story between 1964 and 1972! In early 1967, I believed fiercely that this view of the brain -- grounded in Freud whose works I studied much further in visits to the Harvard Adams House library -- totally explained human intelligence. But (werbos.com/religions.htm) from spring 1967 until winter 1972 I had many startling personal experiences which totally changed my views, step by step. NOW -- when people ask me "what are your holy books?", I say that Von Neumann and MOrgenstern is my Old Testament (the foundation of my neural network models of the brain as supported by data analysis in Werbos and Davis in Frontiers in Neuroscience), but now Cawhich just came outrl Jung's Red Book is my New Testament. The same mathematical models built up from Freud and Einstein can be extended to understand and justify concepts of collective mind which Jung worked so hard to probe. And yes, that kind of extension does require seeing how Freud's concepts of chemical or electrical "cathexis" signals must have PARALLEL , mathematically similar flows to implement backpropagation BETWEEN PEOPLE. In 1967-72, that seemed crazy to me at first.. but I took courses from Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize for inventing "the second quantization," who led me on a path showing a very solid path to the physics which allows that. That path is outlined in the attached book chapter, from 2024 https://www.amazon.in/Exploring-Consciousness-Non-Locality-Come-Carpentier/dp/9391759947 .

Lessons From travel to Alaska and Yukon -- brains, indigenous culture, Vietnam, etc

 I owe great thanks to my wife Ludmilla, who has unique world-class skills in leading us to places all over the world, where we have learned many things known to VERY few Westerners. One month under her unique planning equates to about three advanced graduate courses across many new disciplines.

ONE of those trips, in the summer of 2025, was to Alaska and the Yukon. I recently sent a summary of what we learned on that trip, that few others ever learn, to a group of friends and family:

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1. New discoveries about how our brains work:

FOR EXAMPLE -- Frontiers in Neuroscience asked me to organize a special issue this year, bringing together all the best radical advances in our understanding of how brains really work to generate intelligence. I put together a position paper on this ( https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2024/09/position-paper-for-next-great-advances.html). Section iii, just past halfway through the paper, reports on radical improvements in our understanding of how mammal and bird brains attain the highest levels of general intelligence that they are capable of. The final improvement can be credited to this tour (though it also reflects a foundation we built on from previous trips we have photos for.)

2. Indigenous People

The second group of incredible learning involves indigenous cultures. From earlier trips, we knew how human civilization arose from three MAIN streams of progress beyond the hunter-gatherer stage: "people of the boat, people of the horse, and people of the vegetable." (After our recent trip to Indochina and Thailand, I would refine this a bit, paying more respect to highlanders and elephants.) We knew that the Tlingit people, especially, were important well-integrated people in the ancient high civilization of the people of the boat of the Pacific, crossing the ocean, ranging from places we have seen from Pacific islands, like Hawaii and Maori, to

Peru, to the Champa people of Vietnam. In this trip, we saw more of them (and other great fisher people), BUT ALSO of inland Athabascan people who have a lot to teach us, and others. 

BEFORE this trip, I mainly thought of  early shamanism as MAINLY "mother earth, father sky" (or  mother sky, as Hava has taught us about early Israeli culture). HERE, the role of clans and connections with specific species was VERY striking. For example... in the Yukon (around Dawson) we saw the place where gold was first really discovered, causing a massive change in the world economy. We saw the faces of the group, and the real leader.. a Tlingit guy living inland, whose house (we visited) displayed a prominent statue of an orca, his clan, and ... a bird.  My brain paper mentions orcas... but we now know a lot more about them, about this guy's spiritual connections. And WE met a lot of creatures, like a family of friendly ravens we connected to. 

3. Human-huskie collaboration and brain synchronization

OK -- third most important, but some would say first. In Denali, especially, but also other places, we saw lots of cooperative behavior of humans and huskies, especially. Suddenly I add the names of my long-time friend and collaborator, Robert Kozma, and Scott Kelso, a world leader in the study of brain synchronization. Last year I was amazed by the collaborative, synchronized behavior I saw (unique in the world, in many ways) connecting humans and huskies. At Denali, a lead place of USGS, I saw VERY serious well-funded research teams studying these teams, connecting very important basic science with practical realities of life important to the lives of people in Alaska and Yukon, now and in the past, Euro-American and indigenous both. (I DID see great teams of humans and horses in Iceland, as well, but both places are unique, and I have to say THESE teams in Alaska and Canada were the most impressive.) Above all -- I see exciting NEW opportunities for very important fundamental research strengthening these connections and understanding, making full use of the newest mathematical and cybernetic  tools. 

A lot to learn for those with open eyes... and ears and hearts. 

The geology and the worlds of rocks, the economics and history were ALSO very interesting, but this post is already long enough. 

WAIT: MORE:

History of earth and Champa people of the boat:

SEE https://youtu.be/ghmjIBD2Fd4

After our return from Vietnam, which made me wish SOME of the people in UDSGOV knew half of what we learned, Ludmilla said: "You still have a lot to learn. Watch this video, and the others in the series." I was astounded at how much NEW I learned, complementary to the things Ludmilla and I learned (not in that video), but consistent, and crucial to the whole story. Since we visited the main center of the Champa people in Vietnam, and even met some, and knew the history in Vietnam... we knew SOMETHING, but did not realize how much power they had in earlier centuries. At one point, their power in Southeast Asia...  reminds me a little of my own ancient Viking ancestry (which visited all of Britain and Ireland and penetrated into Germany and France and... on Ludmila's side as far as the Black Sea). Creative and innovative and open people, but a bit oppressive to others at times. Essential parts of humanity and even the genome of humanity, but only PARTS, always in need of balance. As the video made clear!! 

Great new video -- first step in physics to brings humans back to reality and quantum tech which works

 A strong subject -- but 100% well-grounded. Yesterday I saw a RELATIVELY new youtube manifesto from 

Sabine Hossenfelder (whom John has often urged us to track, to keep up with the most serious new advanced physics) and David Deutsch and a moderator named OConnor. ANYONE who has any interest in how the universe really works, OR in quantum technology, really should ignore the commercial and click on the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bux0SjaUCY0. This video is a "small step" in a way, but opening a door can also be a small step... and this door leads directly to what 99% of human "experts" need to know, to know what REAL quantum physics WILL be doing to radically change our lives, our technologies, our politics of war and peace and money, and our very souls sooner than we usually imagine possible. 

COULD changes in technology (and the means of production and the means of war) possibly have such huge impacts? Given the lessons of history, we really should take this seriously. If we worry whether the changes will be good or bad for all of humanity, we really should try to understand what they are. That is especially true when we discuss how the universe works, at a most fundamental level -- and when the known new reality is radically different from even what most physicists have learned (except for a few who thoroughly understand the most relevant physics in nanohub.org, device and condensed matter physics).

I saw this great video for the first time yesterday when I was reviewing a VERY advanced paper on a major advance in quantum technology. I recommended adding citations to David Deutsch of Oxford who INVENTED the quantum turing machine (the foundation of >99% of US funding in quantum computing, for which I was the NSF representative until my retirement in 2015). More precisely, I recommended citing:

 Deutsch, D. (1985). Quantum theory, the Church–Turing principle and the universal quantum computer. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 400(1818), 97-117.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos576/papers/deutsch85.pdf

and

Deutsch, D. (1998). The fabric of reality. Penguin UK.

https://youtu.be/bux0SjaUCY0?feature=shared

I do NOT believe that Deutsch's multiverse theory (which I call EWD, Everett-Wheeler-Deutsch)

is the full theory of how our universe works, mathematically! Iam reminded of Brian Josephson's argument: You can always imagine that the universe we see is actually just an approximation, like a world resting on a turtle deeper down... and and another turtle on thet... turtles all the way down. I really DO believe I have a

better theory, based on studying the emergent behavior predicted by Einsteinian "Classical Fields"

(BOOK] Classical fields: general relativity and gauge theory

M Carmeli - 2001 - books.google.com ) 

as derived in several papers I have published. HOWEVER: in the case of ORDINARY physics of electrons, electromagnetism, and ions, EWD is EQUIVALENT to the relevant Einsteinian

model, if correct models are used for the macroscopic devices we use to observe quantum systems. 

And so, for any technology based on electronics and photonics, or for understanding consciousness in brains like ours based on such physics ( Regular cycles of forward and backward signal propagation in prefrontal cortex and in consciousness ), UNDERSTANDING EWD is the correct foundation for the next big progress we need to make

in all these fields. For example, UNDERSTANDING EWD IS ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to the next big step,

the development AND MANAGEMENT of Quantum AGI (https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos) and the understanding of the quantum effects which ensure that there are parallel copies of every one of us which affect our futureS and our fateS.  See https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/11/q-basic-realities-of-living-in.html .

If you think carefully about the fundamental points I just made -- please notice that quantum intelligence

is NOT necessary to understanding those LEVELS of intelligence or consciousness (including emotions, feelings, qualia) which exist in mammal or bird brains, OR in the new explosion of AGI based on classic QED electronics and photonics. The true picture of such QED brains fits the image of computers called "Romeo and Juliet" in George Bernard Shaw's number one play https://nmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1375.pdf. 

To develop a correct inner understanding of the emerging new levels of human and machine consciousness, I strongly urge you all to read that play and preface, if you haven't yet.

QED AGI can replicate all the pious proud emotions people often cite, arguing for the superiority of humans and human souls over QED AGI. That is a correct picture.

BUT: some of you are aware of how Walter Freeman, one of the world's two top systems neuroscientists two decades ago (when I was close to both), included papers both by me AND by Vitiello in his final summing up, the book edited by Freeman and Kozma (now in a second edition). Vitiello tried to use physics more advanced than QED to try to explain consciousness. More precisely, he built on EWT, the more proven half of the "Standard Model of Physics" as defined by Weinberg, who co-invented EWT and wrote THE authoritative three volumen textbook on mainstream Quantum Field Theory. EWT is NOT necessary to understand that level of consciousness exhibited by mammal brains (or by "Romeo and Juliet" AGI). But in my view, AN EXTENSION of 

EWT, as needed to understand dark matter, IS necessary to understand human potential beyond that level -- EXACTLY AS SHAW portrays!!! 

===========

In my view, human survival even through 2100 urgently demands major progress in BOTH areas: (1) radical improvement in human potential, including even use of physics beyond QED to "see the sky" and see ourselves more than what QED alone offers; (2) full deployment, understanding and open, benign management of quantum AGI technology.

As an old man (forbidden to use the best known antiaging technology, by order of FDA), without more allies ambitious enough to learn how to take on more of the work, I focus for now on (2). The actual deployment of the full QAGI technology, defined in the patent and in the MANY supporting papers, requires more research centers able to understand the new technology, which requires understanding several of the fundamental IMPLICATIONS OF EWD which very few physicists (let alone policy people or philosophers) know today.

For example... to understand and build on the most advanced papers today, like what I reviewed yesterday (being prepared for submission)... it is essential to know what a wave function psi really is, for use in the mathematics of design and design analysis. When I managed reviews of quantum technology, either for the big interagency efforts or for the program I led (https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3310) , MOST highly respected researchers with respected credentials failed review by reviewers aware of modern condensed matter physics because they still believed what they were taught. They believed that the wave function in quantum mechanics represents the state of our knowledge of a system, and can thus represent MIXED thermodynamic states like what we see in real devices. They simply would not work! Even places like DOD fully understood and accounted for that even before

I joined the group; the people who decided to do massive funding of quantum technology did so only after

they saw the paper by Gersheld and Chuang Bulk spin-resonance quantum computation in Science showing how a QTM can be built using the "density operator" way of representing thermodynamc states. A particular value of the wave function, in EWD, represents ONE POSSIBLE state of the universe... or even one possible state of an electronic or photonic device. Only by understanding the evolution of such states through  time can one do valid device simulations or calculations. Such work has in fact begun, demonstrating the kinds of massive benefits described in the new patent, in supporting papers filed with USPTO and in the directories of QAGI LLC (of which I am not an owner, by mutual agreement). 

Is there a university or government or industry lab interested in building up the new physics capability applied to

the relevant multivariate master equations and thermodynamics needed to become centers of QAGI, in partnership?