Excerpts from
The Great Race: Physics, Paranormal, Time Travel, UFO’s.
David Gladstone
under construction
In the late 1970’s when I met Jack Sarfatti, at the Caffe Trieste, it was the intersectional corner at the end of the universe. All sorts of people were there, famous, infamous, musicians, poets, scientists, blue collar workers, hangers on, prostitutes, bikers, everybody you can imagine. It was like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, ‘Here comes Everybody’. For physicists like Sarfatti, the money and opportunities that came from particle and nuclear research had dried up and in the wake of that he had drifted towards his own interests in consciousness. Just before we met he had been living across the street from Grace Cathedral, in an apartment owned by Jean Lanier. In 1942, she married Edwin S. Webster Jr., Senior Partner of Kidder Peabody. In the 1950s she organized the institute of Direct Analysis at Temple University with her good friends Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Laurence S. Rockefeller. She later enrolled in Union Theological Seminary obtaining her Bachelor of Divinity Degree, having studied under Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert MacAfee Brown. In 1965 she married Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal Priest, who had developed a well known mission called American Place Theater at St. Clement’s Church, NYC. While there a CIA spook named George Koopman had told Jack what they were interested in above all else. Consciousness, as in how to control and manipulate it, and how UFO’s fly. Jack had been aware as a young kid even before the phone calls about UFOs. Roswell was a huge news item in 1947 and around 1949 was when he said he met Colonel Phil Corso, the Zelig, of the UFO universe and of course, it was soon after, that reports of UFO’s over Washington D.C., were commonplace events getting big headlines. In 1951 the most iconic UFO film of all, ‘The day the Earth Stood Still’ hot the box office. Sarfatti says that since that day with Koopman, his career focus has been single-mindedly focused on trying to answer that one question.‘How do UFO’s fly?”
Sarfatti already had a reputation as a gadfly, as irascible and and impulsive. He can be obnoxious and he doesn’t play fair. He is not an easy guy to get along with when physics is at stake. Indeed that can be said of most of the initiates of the Invisible College, the stakes are high.
We often butt heads, which reminds me of Paul Kantner, a co-founder of the Jefferson Airplane, perhaps The Iconic Rock Group of the 60’s, he would often listen to the debates with lively interest and it is no surprise to me that I found Philip Dick had included him and Grace Slick in his VALIS book called Radio Free Albemuth, Paul was a devoted fan of Beavis and Butthead and would often talk about them. The roundtable discussions often degenerated into comic book scenarios when they orbited around the Trieste.
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Even though the concept for the Invisible College as first articulated was meant to be a fraternal and convivial place where personal distinctions were forgotten and ideas were to be discussed on their merits, things don’t always work out accordingly. Imagine a table at a caffe, we have Jack Sarfatti, Physicist, educated at Cornell and a PhD at UCSD, whose professors included Hans Bethe, Phil Morrison and whose graduate adviser was Richard Feynman, all heavy hitters, and there are more who played a significant part in the training of the young Sarfatti.
Facing Sarfatti and his gang of virtual instructors, is Paul Zielinsky, whose background includes a B.S. Physical Sciences University of Sussex 1971, Postgraduate courses in History and Philosophy of Science, Kings’ College University of London 1971-72 and Research in fundamental issues in quantum/particle physics for MPhil/PhD Kings’ College University of London to 1976. Zielinsky who is known as Z, and he will be referred to as Z, has been part of the Sarfatti Virtual Roundtable for decades and he has earned his stripes in the full contact physical scrum laughingly called physics! Much of that contact takes place at the Caffe and its surroundings in North Beach, usually outside, so nobody calls the police. As Z recalls when the conversation opened it was Sarfatti in his usual humble mode, “ You think YOU can tell ME something about ‘general relativity’ that I don’t already know? One can say that the gauntlet had been thrown. Z responded with “Actually there is no such thing as ‘general relativity’. ‘I tend to be provocative when I discuss these things’, says Z quietly. But as many of us will testify, no one lightly gets into an argument with Z on anything he cares about and I can testify to that.
It is crucial for this narrative to attempt to describe gravity, to attempt to do with language, something it is clearly not equipped to do. A quick search the internet off the word, ‘gravity’ will bring most people nothing but confusion. Is gravity a ‘force’? “Yes”, says one source, “ No”, says another and on and on ad infinitum. The development of physics was enabled by the use of number, of mathematics, without math, it would just be poetry. In order to get a clue as to what a physicist thinks, one must use math, it’s that simple. We must learn to describe spacetime in terms of local inertial fields and local non-inertial fields. In empty space, a local inertial field, (LIFs) has no gravity. This is the realm of Einstein’s ‘special relativity’ gravity reigns only in local non inertial fields, (LNIF)s, the realm of ‘general relativity’. In physics there exist quantities called ‘tensors’: We must take a deep dive into the simplest possible explanation of what a tensor is, and simply put, as expressed in Wikipedia, tensors alert us to the presence of matter in space and therefore curvature of spacetime or ‘Gravity’.
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But now, back to gravity and back to the Virtual Round Table and the Invisible College. Sarfatti presents a possible way forward for a quantum theory of gravity. Sarfatti met two of his current interlocutors back in 1974, “I first met Bernard and Brian Josephson at Cambridge in 1974 at Ted Bastin’s Psychic Research Society. This was when MI6 Dennis Bardens took me to dinner at Blue Boar Inn and said among other things:“Dr Sarfatti, it is my duty to inform you of a psychic war raging across the continents between the Soviet Union and your country and you are to be in the thick of it.”
Brian Josephson an old friend of Sarfatti’s is a Welsh theoretical physicist, best known for his work on superconductivity and quantum tunneling and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made when he was a 22 year old PhD student at Cambridge in 1962. He has also had lifelong interest in mysticism, psychic phenomena and has attracted a great deal of criticism for his interests. Also there is Bernard Carr, ‘who completed his BA in mathematics in 1972 at Trinity College, Cambridge. For his doctorate, obtained in 1976, he studied relativity and cosmology under Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge’, Carr is also interested in psychic research. —-Wiki. Roderick Sutherland, who researches at the Center for Time in Sydney, and focuses on both relativity and quantum mechanics, writes:
“A possible alternative route to a quantum theory of gravity is presented. The usual path is to quantize the gravitational field in order to introduce the statistical structure characteristic of quantum mechanics. The procedure followed here instead is to remove the statistical element of quantum theory by introducing final boundary conditions as well as initial. The relevant quantum formalism then becomes compatible with the non-statistical nature of general relativity and a viable theory can be constructed without difficulty.” (1502.02058 arXiv.org)
In essence Sarfatti believes that the very existence of gravity itself implies ‘anti gravity’ and this is the ‘Holy Grail’, Sarfatti has been seeking for 70 years, since the phone call from a purported Conscious Computer. That is why he rarely strays far from matter which has curved his personal space time and keeps his focus sharp at 80 plus years.
Everyone who is working on a way to find the Holy Grail of physics now has to be aware of ‘The Five Obervables’, the flight characteristics of the UFO’s so often reported. This is the essence of The Great Race. How can science find the way to surpass the limited abilities of rockets and the prohibition against exceeding the speed of Light, which in physics, in a vacuum, is expressed as ‘c’.
As Z says he tends to be ‘provocative’ in his arguments about relativity, and there are few who can challenge his grasp of the subject, as he has managed to survive for decades in the rough playground of the Invisible College, the all out wars that can break out over a misspoken equation or a the misuse of a term.
This is Sarfatti’s focus. Thanks to his extensive knowledge of Einstein’s Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, (QM) and his planned conversion of QM into Post-Quantum Mechanics, (PQM) by virtue of his ER=EPR formulation, most of multiple schemes for warp drives and ‘propellantless thrusters’ are flying back and forth and in general being swatted down by the annoyed ‘Teacher’ Sarfatti. ‘Maxwell’ is the general name for the hopeful authors of the schemes, who Sarfatti continually berates for their ‘misunderstanding’ of what he calls the ’obvious’. The government has put military people and not scientists at the front and most visible end of its communication effort and this greatly disturbs Sarfatti, The topics of discussion are usually limited to the meaning of scientific concepts, the threats posed by ET technology and actual schemes for some kind of fast drive. In the 30 plus years of the Sarfatti Virtual Round Table, the cast of characters has increased exponentially. It now includes many of the significant physics players, engineers and public figures whether they want to be included or not, in the rough playground scrum, occaisioned by the threat of ET mastery of our strategic forces as summarized in Franc Milburn’s Executive Summary of the Threat, published by The Begin - Sadat Center, (BESA). For Strategic Studies Those who have been put front and center by the government, have found themselves dragged into an ‘unseemly public scrum’, where the government finds its efforts continually being graded F, by the people who know the most. And Sarfatti has no problem with letting everyone hear, that it is he who knows the most. And he is getting annoyed. But while that is the background to the drama, in the foreground the effort to build some kind of craft that can imitate the flight characteristics of the ‘Tic Tacs’ initially spotted by Kevin Day of the Nimitz Carrier Group in 2004. The flight characteristics of these UFOs or UAPs are called ‘the 5 Observables’, which are :
- antigravity lift, (the vehicles seem to be impervious to gravity and not subject to g-forces which with the accelerations above 5,000 g’s, would kill the crew)
2.sudden or instantaneous acceleration, ( because the word instantaneous is prone to misunderstanding, the ‘Tic Tacs’ have shown the ability to reach a significant percentage of the speed of light in what Knuth has calculated to be 11-18 hours, far beyond the capability of any earthly craft.)
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Hypersonic velocities without any visible signatures, sonic booms or visible means of propulsion.
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Low observability or cloaking. UFO’s have demonstrated the ability to avoid detection, they do not emit waste heat as all other moving objects from a seagull to a jet would. They can disappear without warning.
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Trans-medium travel - the ability to operate in extraordinary ways from the vacuum of space to the depths of the oceans without impedance or aerodynamic limitations.
“The flight characteristics of UFO’s are in no way impossible. These people are just stupid. This is a matter of basic physics and not hand-waving magic, they need to contact me ASAP.”
The world we live in in 2023 can not be considered at all peaceful or placid. The chances for a nuclear war are greater now than they were in the cold war 60 years ago. Then there were only two powers contending, with huge stores of nuclear weapons behind each of them. Now we are in a multipolar world with a highly complex set of strategic threats. We also are finally beginning to accept that the space craft that have been reported all over the world for decades and yet have
Been confined as much as possible to the liminal world of our dreams and psi fi novels. Now even the mainstream media, such as the New York Times have acknowledged their reality and that they present a real threat. But our governments have been showing a stubborn disinclination to accept them as real.We have more than ample evidence that meets rigorous standards, that these craft exist. It was nearly 20 years ago that Kevin Day of the US Nimitz Carrier Strike Group spotted a group of UFOs on his radar. Kevin was mocked and talked about and his career was put under a spotlight of intense and unfriendly scrutiny by DOD insiders, “ I paid a very high price personally and I hold the NAVY/DOD directly responsible for their complete and utter malfeasance and dereliction of duty.” For 5 years Day tried his best to warn his superiors the reality of what he saw and yet found ridicule and laughter as a response. After 5 years he finally walked away. Years later the government says it has no idea what these craft are or much else about them.
There is ample evidence that the Russians, The Chinese and others are working on developing the capabilities exhibited by these craft. There is also evidence from work in quantum mechanics that shows that what used to be called paranormal abilities are quite real and that what underlies our everyday life is far beyond what anyone could have considered as normal. Those abilities include telepathy, esp, telekinesis and precognition. Remote viewing has been used for years in secret government funded programs.
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The whole panoply of what was once called psychic phenomena, from intuition, ESP to telekinesis and telepathy is now within reach as a new unified physics is now problem of when and not if.
In 2011 the New York Times presented a review of David Kaiser’s book, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. This was a look into the early days of what was called The New Physics back in the 1960’s and the headline grabbing power of sex psychedelics and science was incontrovertible, the book became a best seller. My own personal timeline put me in the center of the arena that Kaiser explored, starting in the late 1970’s , when I became a habitué of the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco’s Bohemian neighborhood of North Beach. The rents were cheap, the wine and the coffee also, and anyone who was anyone made it their business to see and be seen there. I soon encountered physicist Jack Sarfatti and a strange concatenation of events ensured that for the next many years we would be in close contact and what was called the ‘new physics’ would become an all encompassing ‘Destiny Matrix’, the stress energy tensors of physics and “high strangeness” would dominate and change my destiny, removing even the illusion of control, transforming my life in ways that were totally unimaginable. The Caffe Trieste became our living room, it would become a salon, a circle centered upon physics, UFOs and the paranormal. The public acknowledgement by the government and the New York Times of a phenomena that had been part of human history perhaps since before the inception of human beings on the planet has changed how people feel all this. 2001 was no longer science fiction. The future would indeed be recognized as “the home of explanation.”, as Henry Dwight Sedgwick had written in ‘Apology for Old Maids’.
Kaiser’s narrative was centered on the idea of the Hippies, the unconventional and the non conformist vibe on the West Coast, the developing story of the UFOs and the paranormal but not quite then was it ready. The kettle is whistling now, it’s time.On reflection , I can see there were deeper strains within the field of our activities, contributions from the future we didn’t see or identify correctly. When I first heard the story of Jack’s phone calls from what he called a “conscious computer” on board a spacecraft, it was a shocking and perhaps comical idea, We all laughed. We made jokes about it. How could we not? But somewhere inside those of us who spent our days talking about the strange ships, the abductions, the whole panoply of psi phenomena that we would hungrily read in all the books and articles, we wanted it to be true, of that I have no doubt. We didn’t want Jack to be just another highly educated crank! There was something to this. Too many odd things were happening. I remember meeting the future Nobel Physics Laureate Alain Aspect when he came to San Francisco to meet with Jack. All of us were so excited about his work on the quantum entanglement “Bell Inequalities.” Aspect had already had results that seemed to Jack to be smoking gun evidence that the future was influencing the past, this was an idea that was not new but now it had weight, it had gravity. One day I would know all too what it was like to have a story so laughable to relate. A conscious computer, where is it? In my mind. In the future? Embedded in spacetime? Yeah, right.
I remember the day we met Alain Aspect. He was a French physicist who was working on the thesis that Bell’s Inequalities ( John Stewart Bell of Northern Ireland) were violated in its CHSH version, ( John Clauser, Michael Horne, Abner Shimony and Richard Holt), in particular, by closing a ‘locality loophole’. By the time he came to San Francisco, he had closed more loopholes and his results were verging on the conclusive. We were all excited, then, by his work that seemed to imply that the future could influence the past, but the degree of that influence, the limitations on the meaning can be extracted from that, is still being argued in the trenches of the warfare that is science.
Aspect wanted to discuss the implications of his work and the possibilities his experiments already suggested with Jack. Sarfatti was already well known for his ideas on the future to past connection and his numerous schemes for faster than light communication. He was already pushing the boundaries of space and time, but he still had a lot to learn and discover in 1983.
For Sarfatti, it was that series of phone calls in 1953 which his mother Millie Sarfatti described to me with such surprising clarity that started him on the path he is still following now.
It would be those phone calls that started him on a 70 year voyage of discovery and initiation into an elite order of scientists whose work would be focused on opening the closed universe that surrounds us so that mankind would one day take its proper place among the stars.
It was then he was told he would ‘meet the others’ in 20 years, a cast of characters that spanned the spectrum of ‘high strangeness’ from British Intelligence, CIA, the military, and the sciences. From the ‘groves of academe’ at Cornell, La Jolla, London, Munich , Trieste with, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, David Bohm, Herbert Frohlich, John Archibald Wheeler, Werner Heisenberg, Abdus Salam to the hot tubs of Esalen with Timothy Leary and across the expanse of America to the White House and Ronald Reagan, to the narrow streets, the crowded bars, and cafes of the American Bohemia of North Beach. This is where we shared our cheap railroad flat above Iacoppi’s butcher shop.
Slowly over the years I realized how important was the intellectual, cultural, and scientific stew we ourselves were being slow cooked in. Society was being transformed around us. A new day would not be coming instantly. In this way decades passed. But now, some 50 years after Jack was told he would be in ‘the thick of it’ and some 40 years after I wrote about a coming paradigm shift and the long awaited scientific and intellectual revolution; it is finally here. As one of the members of the new Invisible College remarked recently, Garry Nolan, an immunologist, and Professor of Pathology at Stanford, has over the last 10 years become an important researcher of the UFO/ UAP phenomenon and has been said to have analyzed anomalous materials recovered from downed craft. He is one of the most visible graduates of the ‘Invisible College’. Whether self selected or tapped by destiny, there is a growing cast of characters like Nolan who are unapologetic about what they have to say, and they have the credentials and the first hand experience to carry the future with them. Nolan made the comment recently, on the Tim Ventura podcast, go to place for all things UAP and science, that the “ the time for denial is past.”
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Cause and Effect
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“On the quantum level, I think that, in a sense, things are even more interesting and that’s because there’s a possibility that idea that quantum systems can be affected by what’s going to happen to them in the future, could play a key part in our understanding the puzzles of quantum mechanics. And this is an idea which goes back to the French physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard, who was a student of Prince Louis de Broglie, in the 1940’s. And the idea that de Broglie had, that those issues of ‘spooky action at a distance’ that Einstein was already worried about then, crystallized somewhat later in the famous work of John Bell, quantum entanglement. De Beauregard’s idea was you could get rid of the spookiness, by bringing in backward causation, which could provide a zig-zag path between the two, explaining the bizarre correlation without having to rely on action at a distance.
The arrow of causation, is not some deep fundamental feature of our world. As to the claim that ‘backward causation is too high a price to pay, says Price, is to understand that among the outstanding challenges physicists face in understanding 21st century physics is to reconcile the two great discoveries of twentieth century physics, quantum mechanics on the one hand and relativity, both special and general, on the other.” At present, the idea, Einstein’s idea that spooky action at a distance is at the core of quantum mechanics, is the core of the of great tension between the two. Backward causation would relieve that tension.
I enclose here a sample from recent emails from Sarfatti.
On Mar 18, 2023, at 1:49 PM, David Chester, Ph.D. Theoretical Physics, UCLA wrote:
“Jack is interested in using meta-materials to obtain antigravity. Einstein’s field equations source curvature from energy and momentum, but the in the field equations mean that 1044 units of energy are needed for 1 unit of curvature. He believes that his mathematics with Keith Wanser, implies that this 1044 can be decreased with the right electromagnetic system. Here, he states that he needs low magnetic permeability (and high electric susceptibility), which relate to electromagnetic properties of materials. He refers to recent work from Los Alamos that stated that quasicrystal would have applications for quantum computers. There, the idea is that applying external magnetic fields to a finite patch of a quasicrystal can reconfigure the material properties, which may lead to desirable properties for (a) quantum computers or (b) antigravity (according to Jack).”
One of the things that has been absolutely consistent in his narrative is the idea that the
‘conscious computer’, which called him in 1953, is that ‘it’ was calling somehow, from the future; and what might have sounded somewhat insane years ago, that an event in the future could reach back into the past to share in the credit or blame for instigating what he has called a
‘Destiny Matrix’ of events which may well loom large not only in the lives of many, but in the common destiny of humanity itself. More than thirty years after I met Sarfatti at the Caffe Trieste, in San Francisco’s North Beach, I too had an encounter with what I can only describe
as VALIS, ( vast, active, living, intelligence system) to describe what or who I had a full blown daylight vision of, on February 12, 2011 in Cambridge Mass.
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Sarfatti’s research is mostly in the form of e-mails using the mathematical language of theoretical physics. I shall try to present Sarfatti’s ideas stripped down to the basics. Sarfatti alone, claims we can control spacetime itself, with a low power solution that he expresses the the meme:
ER = EPR
Leonard Susskind, a professor of physics has popularized the above idea, but Sarfatti already had the germ of it back in 1975 in the pop book “Space-Time and Beyond.” but only in the early E.P. Dutton edition with Bob Toben and Fred Alan Wolf. That first edition is now a rare book. Sarfatti and Susskind were graduate students together at Cornell in 1963 and collaborated with Jonathan Glogower on investigating the problem of wave phase and time as an operator in quantum mechanics. Indeed in 2004, Susskind broadcast to the scientific community at large the extent of Sarfatti’s involvement in earlier work:
“ To whom it may concern,
The Glowgower ,Susskind Paper of 1963, which introduced ‘phase operators’ for a quantum oscillator, was in direct response to discussions between Glowgower, Susskind, and Jack Sarfatti. Sarfatti’s contributions were significant. The correct attribution should be to the Glowgower, Sarfatti, Susskind operators.
Sincerely,
Leonard Susskind”
Sarfatti later added a brief explanatory note which should be appended to this email in the historical record.
“ The Question is What is the Question.” John Archibald Wheeler “
Sarfatti writes:
“ER” stands for Einstein’s General Relativity of the gravitational field as the curvature of the classical four-dimensional space-time continuum. EPR is the “nonlocal” quantum entanglement detected in John Clauser’s and Alan Aspect’s experiments showing violation of Bell’s locality inequality. Einstein called entanglement ‘spooky, telepathic, action at a distance’. Nick Herbert calls it quantum voodoo. We now know it has a simple explanation, as back-from-the-future causes of past effects. The “=” is a rather vague kind of duality rather like Niels Bohr’s “complementarity principle.” Lenny Susskind and his students made the idea more precise in terms of the “world hologram principle” in which EPR refers to quantum connections in an N-dimensional boundary ‘hologram plate/screen’ and ER refers to ‘hologram image’ wormholes in N+1 bulk. Our space-time has N = 4. However, in condensed matter physics, we have N = 3 in nanotechnology “quantum wells”, N = 2 in nano-wires and N = 1 in quantum nano-dots. All of these structures are important in the lab engineering of quantum computers. Lenny was using higher dimensional string theory, but we actually have no need of string theory it seems for the practical reverse metric engineering of the flying saucers."
A commentary on ER =EPR, by Sarfatti, with this quote from Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena, “Spacetime locality is one of the cornerstones in our present understanding of physics. By locality we mean the impossibility of sending signals faster than the speed of light. Locality appears to be challenged both by quantum mechanics and by general relativity.Quantum mechanics gives rise to Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen ( EPR) correlations, while general relativity allows solutions to the equations of motion that connect far away regions through relatively short ‘wormholes” or Einstein Rosen bridges. It has long been understood that these two effects do not give rise to real violations of locality. One cannot use EPR correlations to send information faster than the speed of light. Similarly, Einstein Rosen bridges do not allow us to send a signal from one asymptotic region to the other, at least when suitable positive energy conditions are obeyed. This is sometimes stated as “Lorentzian wormholes are not traversable.” But as Sarfatti writes he received an email from Henry Stapp which proved to be significant in this regard.
Sarfatti comments, “ All things are interconnected. Each part of three-dimensional space is connected to ever other part through basic units of interconnection, called wormholes. Signals move through the constantly appearing and disappearing (virtual) wormhole connections, providing instant communication between all parts of space. These signals can be likened to pulses of nerve cells of a great cosmic brain that permeates all parts of space.” This is point of view motivated by Einsteins general relativity in the form of geometrodynamics. A parallel point of view is given in the quantum theory as interpreted by Bohm. In my opinion, this is no accident because I suspect that general relativity and quantum theory are simply two complementary aspects of a deeper theory that will involve a kind of cosmic consciousness as the key concept. Bohm writes of a “quantum interconnectedness.” Einstein derived the gravitational field as dynamical curvature of space-time from the direct reaction of classical matter on it. This forms a highly non linear self-organizing feedback control loop between geometry and matter. The negative susceptibilities of meta-materials permit anti gravity for near non radiating electromagnetic fields creating near non radiating gravity warp fields. The more general Post -Quantum Mechanics (PQM) with traversable ER wormholes dual to locally retro-causal signaling EPR entanglement messaging is to Quantum Mechanics (QM) as General Relativity is to Special Relativity (SR).
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