PHYSICIST. EXPLORER. COSMIC ORIGINAL.
The universe is stranger
than you think. Come on in.
Jack Sarfatti has spent sixty years on one question — can you move without throwing anything? —
and now the thinking machines are in the room.
FAR OUT. UNCHARTED DESTINATIONS.
01 / FOLLOW THE SIGNAL
The big questions deserve a little adventure. Explore Jack’s writing on physics, consciousness, and the possibilities of spacetime. Dig through fifty years of arguments in the archive. Or join the conversation as it unfolds.
02 / THE NEXT CHAPTER
In the universe next door it is 1964, and an imagined Richard Feynman is teaching his Caltech students when pages start arriving through a seam in the air over a Utah ranch: transcripts from 2026 of an old man arguing with thinking machines about how to fly. Each Tuesday the lieutenant unlocks the briefcase, Feynman reads the future aloud, and the class learns physics the way physics is really learned — by pricing an impossible machine and finding out exactly what it owes.
Channeled by Jack Sarfatti.
Edited by Mohamad Al-Zawahreh.
Science faction: every number computed, every date checked, every bet labeled a bet. The old man mails out the bad grades with the good ones. So does the book.
BRING YOUR CURIOSITY. LEAVE THE ORDINARY.03 / THE PHYSICS
Jack’s physics in four panels, the way the lectures teach it: what is solid, what is his, and what he still owes the universe.
Light’s true symmetry has fifteen levers. Einstein pulled ten. Gauge all fifteen and torsion — spacetime’s twist — stops being frozen to spin and starts to travel, carrying a mass, hiding inside its own skin.
Spin may talk to geometry with electricity’s strength, not gravity’s. The whole bet in one number: G* ≈ 1043 × G for electrons — the famous electric-versus-gravity ratio, wearing gauge clothing.
A massive field has two personalities. Mode A: a bound cloud that dresses the hull and moves nothing. Mode B: geometry radiated as a wake — a rocket whose exhaust is spacetime, with no g-force in the cabin. Silent or powered. Never both at once.
The Born rule — the square of the wave — was a footnote Max Born added in proof in 1926. Bohm showed it is an equilibrium. Pump a garnet film hard enough, the old man says, and the pile of clicks might move. Nature hides the wires. Maybe not forever.
Every one of these ends in the same place: two integrals and a needle on a bench. That isn’t a comedown. That’s physics putting its neck on the block.
“The test of all knowledge is experiment.”
— Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, 1–1 (Caltech; free online at feynmanlectures.caltech.edu). Quoted under fair use.
Source in the hull. Field in the vacuum.✳A backpack cannot carry its wearer.✳Material from the Gate is evidence, not authority.✳Nature hides the wires.✳Do not mix the posters.
04 / THE FLIGHT LIBRARY
Six doorways, fifty years apart.
Choose your next departure.
Toward an explanation of the unexplainable. With Bob Toben and Fred Alan Wolf.
A life at the edge of the possible.
The Series: Episode 2, “Dark Energy.”
Through Struggles to the Stars.
Essays by and about the disruptive ideas of physicist Jack Sarfatti.
The principles of metric engineering: low-energy, low-speed warp drive.
Original website artwork. Published editions and covers are shown at the publisher and at Jack’s Amazon author list ↗.
05 / THE FLIGHT LOG
Brooklyn, Heisenberg, Salam, Bohm, the psi wars, a think tank, a coffeehouse: sixty years, one question. Here is the route, stardate by stardate.
Born September 14 to Hyman Sarfatti, son of Emmanuel Sarfatti, in the neighborhood that quietly manufactured physicists out of tailors’ sons. The birth certificate read “Sarfatt”: his mother dropped the final i because of a distant cousin, Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s biographer and confidante. His father had the name legally restored around 1975.
Up to Ithaca at seventeen, the year before Sputnik. Hans Bethe’s Cornell, the cathedral of the bomb-makers.
A month with Werner Heisenberg and John Archibald Wheeler at the Max Planck Institute. Heisenberg’s nonlinear spinor theory is still part of the work, sixty years on.
Later that summer at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, and at Imperial College London, with Abdus Salam, Tom Kibble and Jeffrey Goldstone. The paper with Marshall Stoneham, later FRS: The Goldstone Theorem and the Jahn-Teller Effect, Proceedings of the Physical Society 91 (1967).
PhD, University of California: Gauge Invariance in the Theory of Superfluidity. Symmetry and coherent matter — every idea since has been those two trying to get married.
Birkbeck College, at David Bohm’s elbow. A seminar with five people in it where a young mathematician named Penrose was drawing spacetime out of light rays.
At SRI with astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ and Dean Brown, in the middle of the CIA-funded remote-viewing program — the psi wars, as told in David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics. Then to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste with Abdus Salam.
Space-Time and Beyond. The Physics/Consciousness Research Group. The Fundamental Fysiks Group — the folding-chair crew at the heart of Kaiser’s book, keeping quantum foundations alive when it was career poison.
Science advisor to Lawry Chickering at the Institute for Contemporary Studies, the Reagan-camp think tank in San Francisco: the “physics guy” helping formulate the Strategic Defense Initiative behind the scenes for Paul Nitze, Cap Weinberger and the President, back-channels to Soviet physicists included.
A table at Caffe Trieste, holding a physics seminar for anyone who sits down: poets, sailors, spies, students. A novelist named it Sarfatti’s Cave. It was meant as a joke. Read carefully, it’s the highest compliment on file.
Building AIs that wear Feynman’s voice, arguing with them until three in the morning, and mailing the transcripts — the wins and the wounds, in the same envelope — to sixty physicists the same night.