Surgeon, Pilot, Poet, Astronaut – Renaissance Man Savors Last Shuttle Flight Seattle Times (1996) Waitresses don't believe him when he asks for a senior citizen discount. Maybe it's his physique. Maybe it's his sparkling blue eyes. Maybe it's because he blends in with his colleagues, each of them a generation younger. They're all NASA astronauts. So is he. He speaks with certainty about parallel universes—about extraterrestrial life, and about changing gravity at his command. He says that changing his gravity involves no more than retraining his mind to ignore the dizzying array of visual clues in the surrounding environment.

" I'm the only one I know that sleeps floating. It's delicious. You don't know where you are, and after a while, because your limbs aren't touching anything, you lose sense that you even have them. " 

           – NASA Astronaut Dr. Story Musgrave

One of the astronaut corps' most elegant thinkers and communicators, Story Musgrave is an accomplished pilot, surgeon, mechanic, poet, designer and philosopher. He has written 25 scientific papers in the areas of aerospace medicine and physiology, temperature regulation, exercise physiology and clinical surgery. As one of NASA’s most experienced astronauts, Story has flown on six space flights; he performed the first shuttle spacewalk on Challenger’s maiden flight; he conducted two classified Department of Defense missions; he has spacewalked to repair the ailing Hubble telescope; and, on his last flight, he operated an electronic chip-manufacturing satellite aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. Story participated in the design and development of all space shuttle extravehicular activity (EVA) equipment for his missions—including spacesuits, life support systems, airlocks, and manned maneuvering units. Throughout his 30-year career with NASA, Story enriched his experiences by capturing the essence of spaceflight through a variety of mediums including photography, poetry and personal experiments. Story has seven graduate degrees in math, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology. He has been awarded 20 honorary doctorates.

" Follow your heart. One step at a time, you can build a very powerful repertoire to offer to the world. That’s who you are. " 

           – Story Musgrave

h y p e r s p a c e

Ceud mìle fàilte,

Herewith, I present to you a salient gift: a multisensory talisman of hyperspatial origin, a living, rheological meme flow of universal exploration—whether you be off dreaming between worlds, or out there transmuting dreams into reality in this one.

As a species, we continue forwards in our collective journey, scaling the cosmic ladder of evolution, progressing onwards and upwards, ever improving, expanding in scope and scale of standardized, objective metrics for suffering, compassion, empathy and pleasure. Crime rates continue to plummet. War is on a downward trend. Civil rights for women, minorities and alternative ways of life are transformed, liberated and recognized for the inherent uniqueness and immeasurable value that they express and impart to our communities, our social structures, and to the world. Applied medicine recursively redoubles in synchronized step with Moore's Law, as lifespan continues on its path to escape velocity.

Life is far less brutish and short than it used to be, persisting in its positive long-term upward climb—despite the inevitable eddies and flows, vortices and localized chaotic fluctuations. We've developed central heating and cooling, running water and plumbing, local and general anesthetics, antibiotics, vegetarian and vat-grown meat. Ligand-targeted gene therapies, next-generation neuroscience, nanoscience and designer pharmacology will soon expand and enhance the myriad array of available options and enhancements, so we may be empowered to paint our personal experiences—and the world around us—in tetrachromat, Technicolor rainbows, rather than the primitive Legos and erector sets of olden days yore. Awareness and empathy endure, prevail and flourish. Phonon-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates, linked in unity across relativistic spans of space and time, bring us new visions of contemporary gravity waves, reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics, and disruptive innovations, bound only by imagination, to take us to the stars. Mirror neurons recursively reflect our selves, our friends, our families, our communities, our homes, our whole.

Our understanding of ourselves, and of the world around us, undergoes seismic shifts of revolution after revolution and breakthrough after breakthrough. Matter becomes software. Software becomes mind. Networked computers act in light-speed limited synergistic symphony as quantum game theory yields novel Nash equilibria, transitions and extensions to the classical zero sum games of our fathers, our grandfathers, our ancestors. Our nation-state inheritance, historical dinosaurs and massive behemoths that they are, plod across the landscapes of memespace, reluctant to adapt, nonetheless transformed from within by wave after wave of irresistible cataclysmic social, physical and technological forces of positive revolutions.

As we expand our reach to space and venture outwards to other worlds, Earth comes into view as a destination—no longer limited as a point of origin, and the Overview Effect brings us together in innate recognition of our inherent fragility, unity and responsibility to steward the Earth for ourselves, for our children, and for our children's children. Access to information increases exponentially as cost inversely follows. The Internet allows minds such as our own to connect instantaneously across the globe—to bridge the gap, to share ideas that hold profound and positive potential to radically transform not just our own forward light cone—but to branch out and harness the influence of parallel and analogue instantiations of the Everett wavefunction, to calculate ancient, universal questions in the blink of an eye.

And this is just the beginning. We can scarcely begin to imagine what we will dream of, and bring into existence tomorrow. Wormholes, warp drives and closed timelike curves whisper themselves into being through our imaginations. ER = EPR. Entanglement is wormholes, forming the most fundamental of foundations—making allowance for the formation of spacetime itself. Learning effects across space and time and Everett branches mandate these myriad trends. Life itself is deeply infused with advanced quantum technology, as superposition unfolds through the expansive multiverse—a vast, active, living intelligent quantum learning architecture (VALIS) of untold depth and complexity, an adaptive, responsive, evolutionary genetic algorithm—advancing ever onwards to calculate and optimize the universal utility function across the state space of all possible observers.

As newfound technological tools convey manifold expansion to our most elegant expressions of precision, depth and complexity and we fumble less in our monkey bodies on this recursive upward trajectory, our ability to manifest mind in our local environment grows by leaps and bounds and orders of magnitude. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and any sufficiently advanced alien race is indistinguishable from God. At the end of our journeys, we will finally come to find that which we were looking for, and we will turn in reflection to find that the footprints we were following in the sand were our very own.

– Christopher Altman                                                   

" Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel—for what he or she must aim at is to make things better than they are. "

 – Niels Bohr                                        

Earth in True Perspective

The small green square in the photo to the left, a brief, single snapshot in time—what appears to be only a cold, empty void of absolute darkness, with nary a single star to be seen by the naked eye—in fact contains within the dark confines of its hazy boundaries the luminous wonders of over 10,000 beaming galaxies, each shining with the light of a trillion suns.

Back here at home, only a few short footsteps from your door, countless species of sea life and coral live out their lives: lush cliffs and caves, flora and fauna, and schools of fish, from tiny as needles, to larger than a great dane―millions of intertwined species, an interplay of flourishing ecosystems, locked together in singular symbiosis. An octopus drifts silently by, observing its surroundings in the stillness of soft, quiet reflection, as the full spectrum of the rainbow―liquid lines of chameleon color, glimmer just beneath its membranous skin.

With no moon, and no light above save for distant twinkles of starlight and the light of worlds light years away, two distant lightning storms on the East and West horizons bring intense contrast to the endless voids both above and below. As far as the eyes can see, no land interrupts this unbroken line of darkness. Complete blackness blankets the waters beneath, with the exception of phosphorescent plankton, which flash and glimmer like sparks in the night as we glide silently through the waters, or when softly stirred by a cool caress from the back of your hand. The dividing line between jet black sea and infinite sky is wholly absent, evoking a sense of leisurely drift through those deep, distant space nebulae—a synaesthetic, psychedelic experience, much akin to sensory deprivation.

The luminous arms of the Milky Way, usually no more than a faint trace across the sky when enveloped in the chaos and cacophony of our contemporary pachinko parlor-laced urban climes, still a dim spark, even, from deep in the meadows of a distant countryside—shine bright as Times Square overhead. An experience beyond words, evocative of the distinctive hallmarks called to mind through the end sequences of Contact, or Kubrick's 2001.

Across the universe, the distant void yields to powerful beams of light borne from nuclear fusion sourced deep in the hearts of a trillion stars, each shining radiant warmth and light down upon alien worlds. Consider, for the briefest of moments: the unimaginably vast number of living worlds that circle those other suns, in this tiny distant window of space and time alone. Each and every one holds, 'tween the span of its horizons, boundless wonders and volumes of mysteries—countless miracles of dazzling complexity that mirror our own richly-populated, endlessly intricate, fractal, yet familiar home world.

Imagine how many others just like you are out there right now, this very moment―looking up to us in curiosity and contemplation, through the dizzying, stellar symphony of unfamiliar constellations dancing their way across strange, alien nighttime skies. Each calls back to us through the unfathomable void, making their way across the vast expanse of more than thirteen billion light years of space and time.

                           – Christopher Altman

Los Alamos Event Horizon

In Kona, Hawai‘i, in July 2013, I met Richard J. Hughes, then a Laboratory Fellow in the Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hughes had founded and co-led the Laboratory’s Quantum Communications team and served as Scientific Director of its Quantum Institute.

Few institutions represent science at the frontier of consequence as powerfully as Los Alamos. Established in 1943 as Project Y of the Manhattan Project, the Laboratory was built to turn problems at the edge of the possible into national capability.

Hughes had also chaired the Technology Experts Panel that produced A Quantum Information Science and Technology Roadmap, serving as its document coordinator. That roadmap had strongly influenced the direction of my graduate work.

When I introduced myself at the conference, I told him how much his leadership had meant to me.

“To the contrary,” he replied. “It’s an honor for me to meet you—you inspired me.”

I was taken aback. “How could that be? I was only a graduate student at the time.”

Hughes referred to the collection of technology-assessment reports I had prepared through my work with the Advanced Research and Development Activity’s QuIST program. Working from Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, I traveled to leading national laboratories, universities, and corporate research institutes across East Asia and Europe to assess the emerging quantum-information landscape. The resulting reports were circulated among scientists and program leaders across the United States.

Hughes told me that those assessments had helped demonstrate the value of a structured national appraisal of the field. They informed, he said, his approach to organizing the expert-led roadmap effort.

That exchange changed my understanding of scientific influence. Work can travel much farther through institutions than its author is ever permitted to see.

Our conversation led Hughes to invite me to visit Los Alamos.

“How long should I schedule?” I asked. “Two days, two weeks, two months?”

He winked. “You know, Los Alamos is a black hole. With all the exciting projects we have going on here, you might disappear altogether—and never leave.”

— Read the contemporaneous account I wrote after returning from Kona.

The next frontier of quantum communications

Listening to Rupert Ursin's closing talk on Free-Space Quantum Communication towards Satellites. 

Over the last week, we shared the sunset from the summit of Mauna Kea, tracked binary star clusters and shining nebulae from telescopes atop the mountain, joined a round of native Hawaiian chants to give thanks to the land, the jungle and our ancestors in a hand-built, solar-powered treehouse deep in the rainforest — snorkeled through the same crystalline waters as the sea turtles and dolphins in Waikoloa Bay, enjoyed fresh coconut water and enchanted conversations on quantum mechanics and the nature of reality as whirling dervishes, beautiful dancers flitted around us at the naked drum circle of Kehena's black sand beach — took in arms-length views of active cliffside lava flows and giant, billowing sulfuric gas clouds, violently heaving and shaking the ground beneath our feet, erupting into massive steam columns as they crashed into the ocean, slicing through the thin ribbon of coastline interface between land and sea, dead in the middle of the night, miles from civilization ... 

The Next Frontier of Quantum Communications — with Richard Hughes, Tim Ralph, Wolfgang Tittel, Jaewan Kim and Masahide Sasaki at the IEEE Quantum Photonics and Communications Meeting, Hilton Waikoloa, Hawaii

Alan Aspuru-Guzik granted tenure at Harvard University "Breaking news: I just found out I got tenure 10 minutes ago. Thanks to all my friends for their support!"
— Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Quantum physicist Andrew White among new Australian Academy of Science Fellows University of Queensland  "Professor White  has built an international reputation through his work in quantum physics. His characterization of a quantum logic gate, the fundamental building block of a quantum computer, has set the standard in the field. His research has been published extensively in numerous high-profile journals such as Nature Communications, Science, Physical Review Letters, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and New Journal of Physics."