I’m sorry to report that Martin Gardner died on May 22, 2010. Scientific American is running some nice web pages about him. Be sure to check the links at the bottom of the Scientific American page, they have are four different pages to look at. And check the New York Times obit as well.

I’ll do a bit of a Martin celebration here as well. First of all I’m posting the text of an article, “Martin Gardner: Impresario of Mathematial Games,” that I wrote for a magazine called Science 81 in 1981.

Secondly, I wrote up a short note on Martin for a Milestone piece in next week’s Time magazine—my note just appeared online, and it will be in the print edition as well.

And thirdly, here’s an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls. This passage describes the trip that I took to North Carolina to interview Martin.

The beloved popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner had just retired from his post at Scientific American. I’d worshipped Martin’s columns as a boy, and over the years I’d corresponded with him a little bit—he was great about answering his fan letters. So in the summer of 1981 I got Science 81 to send me to interview him at his house in North Carolina.

This was the first truly journalistic outing of mine, and I enjoyed it a lot. Martin was a kindly old guy, very sharp, and a wizard at sleight of hand. He showed me a trick where he made a coin move right through a sheet of latex rubber that he stretched tight over a shot-glass. He claimed he’d made the coin move through the fourth dimension.

“Please tell me the secret!” I cried. “I’ll give you half the money I’m being paid for this interview!” I’ve always been a sucker for the fourth dimension.

Martin waved off my foolish offer. Not only did he show me how to work the trick, but he gave the requisite supplies so that I could mystify my family and friends. They appreciated the trick, not that any of them ever offered to pay me for the secret!

Rather than using a tape recorder, I just jotted down notes on Martin’s answers to my questions, and that was enough to help me later on when I had to write out the full answers on my typewriter. I have a very good memory.

Something that impressed me about Martin was that he’d been a freelance writer his whole life. He’d even sold some mathematics-based science-fiction stories when he’d been starting out. Up near the ceiling of his basement office, he had a very long bookshelf with all the books he’d published, each title in numerous editions and translations. I dreamed that someday my books could fill a shelf like that.

Before dinner Martin made martinis for his wife, himself and me, using a special glass eyedropper to measure out the vermouth. I went to motel and smoked a joint, then met Martin and his wife at a local restaurant for dinner. At the table, I excitedly rattled on about infinite dimensional space and parallel worlds. Martin and his wife gave each other a look. They knew exactly where I was at.

The next morning, before I left, Martin lent me a box of rare books on the fourth dimension. And eventually he even wrote a preface for my book, The Fourth Dimension, even though he had a philosophical disagreement with my mystical notion of an overarching One Mind. Martin was a pluralist, believing that there are many higher forces at work, rather than just one. He loved pondering arcane metaphysics, indeed he wrote a little-known novel about theology called The Flight of Peter Fromm. A fascinating and warm-hearted man.

A reminder that the closing party for my art show in San Francisco is on Saturday, May 22, 2010, running from 6 to 10. Details here. I’ll be selling recent art and fractal prints as well as canvases. As part of the SF in SF series, I’ll be reading with author Michael Shea. My readings will be some of the gnarliest bits from my forthcoming four-novel omnibus Ware Tetralogy. Michael will be reading from his kick-ass new novel, The Extra.

Here’s a new painting that I worked on this week, I guess it’s called “Insane Skate Posse.” As I mentioned in my post earlier this week, “Fractalmania! With a T-Shirt,” I’ve been working with higher-order fractals of late, and I found a really nice double spiral that came from a cubic Mandelbrot set. I saved off a high-res image of it, and started selling the image online as a skater T-shirt with the caption “Seek the Gnarl.” And then I decided to do a painting of this fractal, even though it’s a quixotic effort to paint an infinitely complex object.

I started with just the painting of the fractal, and then I took a photo and pasted on some web images of skaters, and drew on the computer image, and painted that desgin onto my picture. I always think I can’t draw or paint people, but somehow if I chip away at it, something kind of reasonable comes out. It’s not like I need to do photo realism, after all.

I’m slowly working on a story about fnoor, like I was talking about before. In it, a renegade app-programmer is studying a pink patch of fnoor (a.k.a. graphic chaos) in an image made on his off-brand tablet-computer by his run-anywhere “Phractal Phun” app, and he says, “You might say that the pink fnoor is a funhouse-mirror image of a spoiled-rich-kid Apple exec’s furious face inside the Qwirky program that I’m using to emulate the iPad’s app-running code.”

Speaking of programming, I did something potentially self-destructive night before last. I had insomnia, and around 2:40 a.m., I noticed that Microsoft gives away a free “Express edition” of their Visual C++ compiler, and I downloaded it and started trying to rebuild my old 16-bit Boppers app as a modern 32-bit app that will run in Windows 7. I felt like a crack-head deciding to do just one rock. I thought I’d given up programming for good. But the computer gods were kind to me, my old programming skills came back to me, and I managed to fix most of the issues and even some old bugs in Boppers yesterday, and hope to post a superduper Boppers 2010 version soon. Just one more rebuild! [As of May 20, it’s happening baby! Go to www.rudyrucker.com/boppers.]

Last week my wife and I saw a great show at the San Jose Quilting museum by Joan Schulze, who lives in the South Bay and has a studio in San Francisco. Schulze herself was at the show—it was the exhibition’s last day—and she was very friendly and talkative. Her quilts are anything but traditional—one might equally well call them fabric art, and Schulze is justly compared to Rauschenberg. I got a photo of her next to one of her works that I liked a lot. She made it while teaching a worshop in the U. S. southwest. That squiggly calligraphy, it’s ink, and it looks vaguely Arabic to me. The color shades are so lucious here, and the quilting stitches are a whole game in themseles. Anothe favorite of mine is called “The Angel Equation.” There’s a nice slide show of her works on her site, and a link to a reptrospective book of her work: Poetic License.

I saw about half of the movie Nine last week. I’d thought it sounded promising: a remake of Fellini’s classic 8 1/2, with a superstar cast, transmogrified into a musical. But, my word, it’s awful. I’m always forget what hideous songs they use in musicals—the singers narrating, in flat-key half-notes, prolonging arbitrary ugly notes for…what? Emphasis? “It’s nice to see you naaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooooooooooooooooooow?” And those horrible songs are always at least twice as long as seems bearable. And, oy, the vulgarity and puritanism of the script! Fellini’s imposing, battered, primitive-sex-goddess Saraghena becomes…a Victoria’s Secret model? And the mistress played by Penelope Cruz has none of her the pathos, wit, or dignity—what a waste of Penelope’s skills. And ditto for Nicole Kidman’s role. Ugh, ugh, ugh!

Speaking of songs, I read a glowing article about LCD Soundsystem in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. (The review, by Sasha Frere Jones, is only online in an abridged form.) I looked up one of LCD Soundsystem’s videos: “Drunk Girls.” It rocks like Lou Reed’s “White Light, White Heat.”

Drunk Girls

A recent video of “Drunk Girls” by LCD Soundsystem.

As a video, “Drunk Girls,” reminds us that music videos really don’t have to consist male and female sexhibitionists doing aerobics (sorry, Lady Gaga, although I did enjoy parts of “Telephone”—like your prison-yard sunglasses made of a hundred burning cigarettes, and your quick little right-on dance move right before you get out of jail, and the horizontal-hands Egyptian-style-happy-rabbit dance moves in the diner after you and Beyonce poisoned everyone—but, please, enough with the Jackson family leather-thong dance troupe aerobics!)

LCD Soundsystem is on tour, playing here in SF at the Fillmore on June 3, but dang, the show is sold out. James Murphy, if you’re reading this, put me down for two tickets on the guest list!

About ten days ago, on May 3, 2010, I did a post, “SF and Quantum Mechanics #1,” and today’s post is the follow-up. Although there really are a zillion things one might talk about in this context, in these two posts I’m focusing on six areas. I went into (1) ”“ (3) in my SF & QM #1 post, and in the fairly extensive and interactive comments—these discussions involved possible SF stories involving (1) the Planck length, (2) many universes, and (3) superposed states. And now, in “SF & QM #2,” I’ll tackle topics (4)-(6).

[Slime is health. A ditch near Alviso, CA.]

So onward with my ramshackle QM rap. Harrumph. Today we’ll address these topics:

(4) The Secret Theory. Can there be hidden variables and a deterministic theory at a deeper level than QM?
(5) QM Teep. The QM notion of entanglement says that distant particles’ states are in some instantaneous way correlated.
(6) Everything’s Alive. Quantum computation indicates that any piece of matter can be regarded as a supercomputer, potentially capable of carrying out intelligent-seeming computations.

[My sage friend Gunnar and a relativistic train.]

(4) The Secret Theory.

To some of us it seems annoying that QM only gives a probabilistic prediction of what happens when you measure some given quantity. We’d like to think that there might be some so-called hidden variables at a deeper level, and a richer theory involving these hidden variable which would in fact give completely accurate and deterministic predictions.

QM has several defenses against this hope, in particular the celebrated experimental work involving “Bell’s Theorem,” seems to show that no theory of local hidden variables can correctly match up with the observed results of quantum mechanics.

One way out is to assume there is some kind of global, all-pervasive set of “hidden” or underlying variables. As I put it in a post back in December 10, 2004, “What is Reality? Two CAs,” , it is possible to have “a deterministic universe despite the wifty, come-drink-the-Kool-Aid mystery-mongering of quantum mechanics.”

You must have to suppose that there is an underlying reality which is utterly deterministic both forwards and backwards in time. The scientist Stephen Wolfram had, for a time, some hope of finding the underlying final theory for such a world. His hope that the theory might be something rather simple, a bit like time-reversible cellular automaton rule. The tricky part is finding (a) the rule and (b) at least one complete “Now” to use as the seed for running forward and backwards. Everything has to be just right.

Although Wolfram seems now to have turned to other things, I don’t find his quest unreasonable. In thinking along these lines, I’m inspired by John Cramer’s“The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”. In Cramer’s physics, the future influences our present every bit as much as does the past. Synchronicity is not an illusion, events really are very tightly knit together.

[The only known recording of the large-scale movements of the earth during the Great Quake in San Francisco, 1906, on display at the Mt. Hamilton Observatory near San Jose, CA.]

In some sense a spacetime like Cramer’s needs to be crafted all at once, and from a vantage point wholly outside of space and time. I sometimes like to interpret Cramer’s theory as meaning that our universe is patterned like a novel, with synchronistic and meaningful correspondences built in. These correspondences establish themselves not by cause-and-effect, from outside of time, from the Pen of the some Author (or Process). Here’s a link to my passage discussing this notion in an online section of my tome, The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul.

On the way to creating a properly novelistic universe, a Creator might go through a number of drafts, as I mentioned in my earlier “SF & QM #1” post connection with the notions of multiple universes, and my novel Mathematicians in Love. But it’s just as “likely” to suppose he/she/it/they/we managed to get it right on the first try. If something’s impossibly difficult, doing a few warm-ups isn’t necessarily going to get you all that much closer to success.

A completely different approach to a hidden variables theory is to suppose that there are particles below the Planck length or, even better, to suppose that matter is indeed infinitely divisible. In the “SF & QM, #1” post, I mentioned my online story “Jack and the Aktuals,” in which the characters find a transfinite world universe of “hidden variables” down beneath the Planck length, with ever-smaller size scales to explore.

[Quantum foam washes up on the shores of the salty ponds in the SF Bay just north of the San Ho airport.]

(5) QM Teep.
Whether or not we believe QM to be a final theory, we seem to be stuck with the fact that the states of distant objects are entangled with each other—particularly if the two objects in question have ever spent any quality time together. And, hey, if the superdense yobbity-yob seventeen-septillion-clowns-in-one-VW moments of the early universe aren’t quality time, then what is?

Everything affects everything else! But, as usual, science hastens to throw on cold water—in this case by saying that you can’t use entanglement to send messages. But why should SF writers worry about that kind of buzz-kill? We can always find a work-around. In my story, “Panpsychism Proved,” now online, I used some special kind of quantum dots to promote telepathy, which I often call teep.

In general, I might suppose that I can use quantum entanglement to read a distant friend’s mind because, after all, we two have broken bread together. Left to their own devices, our minds fuzz out and become uncertain, but when one of decides something then, given that we’re entangled, the other one decides the same thing too.

[A Mandelbrot set inside the Rudy Set, you can find it by zooming into the RudyRockets image.]

Turns out this move is too much of a cliché to work in SF today. The people who seriously use quantum entanglement as an explanation for psychic phenomena tend to be working a commercial New Age vein. There’s this phenomenon called “decoherence” that tends to screw up your quantum-entangled connection to your pals. So it’s probably wiser for an SF writer to get telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation by some other means than by entanglement—unless you’re simply out for a lark, or a short-short smash-and-grab.

I most recently used a quite different explanation for telepathy in my novel Postsingular. Here the world has a “paranormal branespace topology”, meaning that one of the normally rolled-up “vermin dimension,” the eighth dimension in fact, is unrolled, and everyone can think out along it to an attainable point at infinity which serves a global telepathy server. You can read this passage of Postsingular online here.

Ph. D. means “piled high and deep.” Let’s kill this sixer.

[Prof. Rucker with a dried cowpie near Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose.]

(6) Everything’s Alive.
As a fuddy-duddy computer science professor, I used to resist the notion of quantum computation. It sounded so flaky—and may well be hamstrung by the decoherence issue. This said, I eventually came around. As an SF writer, I can’t afford to turn my back on a technology that can turn ordinary matter into an inconceivably powerful computer.

The line that pushed me into the quantum computation camp was when I read a remark that whenever you shine light on something it’s doing a quantum computation. How cool is that?

In a post called “Breaking the Bank of Computation,” on September 21, 2009, I got into it and did a back-of-a-matchbook calculation of just how much computation our universe might do for us, running flat out as a quantum computer. You’d get maybe 10-to-the-229th-power operations per second. A little less than a googol cubed.

The tricky bit of course is figuring out how to program raw matter. As I argued in my “Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality” post on March 3, 2008, there’s really no reason to disassemble our friendly ordinary matter and turn it into some spurious stuff called “computronium.” Regular matter can compute fine just as it is.

But the input/output is an issue. And this is worth thinking about in SF. In my novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, I went ahead and had ordinary objects carrying out autonomous, emerging, evolving mind-like computations. And, just to get the novel written, I assumed that we’d talk to our wise doo-dads via telepathy. I gave some talks on this under the name “Psipunk,” the last time I was in Japan.

Cast off the chains of QM dogma and crank it up! We’ve barely started…