Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the new book HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser.
Rarely can we date with any precision the ebbs and flows of scientists’ research styles or intellectual approaches. Yet these transitions—the how’s and why’s behind major shifts in a scientific field’s reigning questions and methods—have long held a special fascination for me. We see laid bare in these moments a messy alchemy, intermixing the world of institutions with the world of ideas. Brilliant insights and dazzling discoveries take their place alongside political decisions, funding battles, personal rivalries, and cultural cues. These many ingredients combine to make one agenda seem worth pursuing in a particular time and place—and worth teaching to students—while quietly eclipsing other questions or approaches that had beckoned with equal urgency only a few years earlier.
In the case of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which ultimately spawned quantum information science, we may detect just such a seismic shift in the 1970s. The physics profession in the United States suffered the lashings of a perfect storm between 1968 and 1972. Internal audits at the Department of Defense led to massive cutbacks on spending for basic research, which had financed, directly or indirectly, nearly all graduate training in physics for decades. Desperate for more soldiers to feed the escalation of fighting in the Vietnam War, meanwhile, military planners began to revoke draft deferments for students—first for undergraduates in 1967, then, two years later, for graduate students as well—reversing twenty years of draft policies that had kept physics students in their classrooms. Across the country, the Cold War coalition between the Pentagon and the universities crumbled under wave after wave of teach-ins and sit-ins, ultimately lost in a tear gas fog. Amid the turmoil, the nation’s economy slid into “stagflation”: rising inflation coupled with stagnant economic growth. All at once, physicists faced massive budget cuts, a plummeting job market, and vanishing student enrollments.
As the Cold War nexus of institutions and ideas collapsed, other modes of being a physicist crept back in. The transition was neither smooth nor painless. Caught in the upheavals, a ragtag crew of young physicists banded together. Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, both graduate students in Berkeley, California, founded an informal discussion group in a fit of pique and frustration in May 1975. From their earliest years they had been captivated by books about the great revolutions of modern physics: relativity and quantum theory. They had entered the field with heads full of Einstein-styled paradoxes; they, too, dreamed of tackling the deepest questions of space, time, and matter. Yet their formal training had offered none of that. By the time they entered graduate school, the watershed of World War II and the hyperpragmatism of the Cold War had long since shorn off any philosophical veneer from physics students’ curricula. In place of grand thoughts, their classes taught them narrow skills: how to calculate this or that physical effect, rather than what those fancy equations might portend about the nature of reality.
The two students had ties to the Theoretical Physics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a sprawling national laboratory nestled in the Berkeley hills. They decided to do for themselves what their teachers and textbooks had not. Reserving a big seminar room at the lab, they established an open-door policy: anyone interested in the interpretation of quantum theory was welcome to attend their weekly meetings, joining the others around the large circular table for free-ranging discussions. They continued to meet, week in and week out, over the next three and a half years. They called themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group.”
Their informal brainstorming sessions quickly filled up with like-minded seekers. Most members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group found themselves on the periphery of the discipline for reasons beyond their immediate control. Although they held PhDs from elite universities like Columbia, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Stanford, their prospects had dried up or their situations had become untenable with the bust of the early 1970s. Adrift in a sea of professional uncertainty, the young physicists made their way to Berkeley. Finding themselves with time on their hands and questions they still wanted to pursue, they gravitated toward Rauscher and Weissmann’s group. They met on Friday afternoons at 4 p.m.—an informal cap to the week—and the spirited chatter often spilled late into the night at a favorite pizza parlor or Indian restaurant near campus.
The group’s intense, unstructured brainstorming sessions planted seeds that would eventually flower into today’s field of quantum information science; they helped make possible a world in which bankers and politicians shield their most critical missives with quantum encryption. Along the way, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, together with parallel efforts from a few other isolated physicists, contributed to a sea change in how we think about information, communication, computation, and the subtle workings of the microworld.
Despite the significance of quantum information science today, the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s contributions lie buried still, overlooked or forgotten in physicists’ collective consciousness. The group’s elision from the annals of history is not entirely surprising. On the face of it, they seemed least likely to play any special role at all. Indeed, from today’s vantage point it may seem shocking that anything of lasting value could have come from the hothouse of psychedelic drugs, transcendental meditation, consciousness expansion, psychic mind-reading, and spiritualist séances in which several members dabbled with such evident glee. History can be funny that way.
While the physics profession foundered, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group emerged as the full-color public face of the “new physics” avant-garde. Hovering on the margins of mainstream physics, they managed to parlay their interest into a widespread cultural phenomenon. They cultivated a new set of generous patrons, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to self-made entrepreneurs like Werner Erhard, guru of the fast-expanding “human potential movement.” With money pouring in from these untraditional sources, the Fundamental Fysiks Group carved out new institutional niches in which to pursue their big-picture discussions. Most important became the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, fabled incubator of all things New Age. For years on end, members of the group organized workshops and conferences, freely mixing the latest countercultural delights—everything from psychedelics like LSD to Eastern mysticism and psychic mind-reading—with a heavy dose of quantum physics.
To many journalists at the time, the Fundamental Fysiks Group seemed too good to be true. What better reflection of the times than to see physicists grappling with the problems of consciousness, mysticism, and the paranormal? The earliest coverage showed up in underground arenas dedicated to celebrating, not just reporting, the latest countercultural twists and turns. On the heels of his critically acclaimed films The Godfather and American Graffiti, for example, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola bought the fledgling City of San Francisco magazine. One of its earliest issues after Coppola’s renovation devoted a two-page spread to several core members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, focusing on how the “new physicists” were busy “going into trances, working at telepathy, [and] dipping into their subconscious in experiments toward psychic mobility,” all the better to understand subtle quantum effects. A few months later some members of the group heard from Timothy Leary, the former Harvard psychology professor turned poster boy for New Age antics and all things psychedelic. At the time Leary was still in a California jail on drug charges, though he had hardly stopped working. Together with novelist and counterculture icon Ken Kesey (of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and “Merry Pranksters” fame, and the inventor of the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests”), Leary was busy editing a special issue of the quirky Bay Area magazine Spit in the Ocean, and he was eager to publish some of the far-out essays that the hippie physicists had submitted. Soon after that, one of the core members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, Jack Sarfatti, showed up on the cover of North Beach Magazine, another San Francisco niche publication, in full guru mode: framed by a poster of Einstein and holding a copy of physicist George Gamow’s autobiography, My World Line. When novelist and Beat generation hipster Herb Gold composed his memoirs of life among the likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, the first off-scale personality to appear in the narrative was Sarfatti, holding forth on quantum physics in the Caffe Trieste, North Beach, San Francisco.
The media coverage was by no means limited to these “tuned-in” venues. Time magazine ran a cover story about “The Psychics” with ample space devoted to Fundamental Fysiks Group participants. Newsweek covered the group a few years later. California Living Magazine ran a long story about the “New new physics,” complete with head shots of several group members. In May 1977, the group’s Jack Sarfatti shared the podium with eccentric architect Buckminster Fuller and “five-stages-of-grief” psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as a keynote speaker at a “humanistic psychology” conference. Not long after that, the San Francisco Chronicle devoted a half-page article to Sarfatti, depicted as the latest in a long line of “eccentric geniuses” to set up shop in the city’s bohemian North Beach area. Even newspapers as far away as the New Hampshire Sunday News covered the group’s intellectual peregrinations. Virtually overnight, members of the informal discussion group had become counterculture darlings.
One might be tempted to dismiss the Fundamental Fysiks Group and its antics as just one more fringe phenomenon: a colorful reminder of tie-dyed life in the 1970s, perhaps, but of little lasting significance. After all, as a sociologist observed as early as 1976, members of the group consistently posed questions and acknowledged experiences that would have “served to label the participants as mentally deranged” only a few years earlier. Surely some cordon sanitaire separated the group from “real” physics.
When other sociologists turned attention to the Fundamental Fysiks Group—and related outcroppings of activity, such as studies of “plant empathy” or the international spoon-bending fad inspired by the apparently psychic feats of Israeli performer Uri Geller—they, too, framed the matter in terms of “demarcation.” The eminent philosopher Sir Karl Popper introduced the demarcation problem in the middle decades of the twentieth century: how do scientists draw boundaries between legitimate science and something else? The issue had little to do with truth or falsity. Popper readily acknowledged that many of today’s scientific convictions will wind up as tomorrow’s forgotten missteps. Popper was after something else, some set of criteria with which to distinguish proper scientific investigation from unscientific efforts. He had some searing examples in mind. As a young man he had experienced the convulsions that wracked daily life in his native Austria in the wake of World War I. The troubled times had inspired all manner of dogmatisms. He sought some means of separating Marxism, psychoanalysis, and astrology from the canons of scientific inquiry. What made the pursuit of those topics distinct from, say, Einstein’s relativity?
Since Popper’s day, philosophers have spilled much ink in pursuit of those elusive demarcation criteria. Yet sociologists have countered with case after case, showing that scientists make judgments and draw boundaries in ways that rarely stack up with the philosophers’ rarefied notions. Who is to say where the line should be drawn in any given instance? Popper’s progeny never could establish any Maginot Line of legitimacy, some set of factors that might reliably separate real science from the imposter projects that had so exercised the great philosopher.
The demarcation problem becomes acute in the case of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Try as we might, we cannot cleave off the group or its activities from the “real” physics of the day. Many of the members’ activities placed them on one end of a spectrum, to be sure. But no hard-and-fast dividing line separated them from legitimate—even illustrious—science. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group were entangled with mainstream physics on multiple levels, including people, patronage, and intellectual payoff. The group’s marginal position and its multiple interactions with mainstream physics provide a unique view onto what it meant to do physics during the turbulent 1970s.
The hippie physicists of the Fundamental Fysiks Group help us map still larger transitions in American culture, beyond the shifting fortunes of physics. A few journalists in San Francisco and New York City coined the term “hippie” in the mid-1960s, searching for some way to describe the rising youth culture that was mutating beyond the “hipsters” of the 1950s Beat generation. With the media attention came the first waves of pushback. As California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan put it in 1967, after the hippie scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district had become a national obsession, a hippie was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” Reagan’s quip lumped together groups whom scholars have recently labored to distinguish, often with Jesuitical precision. The left-leaning hippie movement, for example, had an uneasy relationship with the “New Left,” the campus-based liberal and increasingly radical political movement associated with the Students for a Democratic Society and (ultimately) the Weather Underground. Members of the New Left aimed at organized political intervention, inspired by the civil rights movement and stoked by the escalation of the Vietnam War. The campus radicals often looked with dismay on their hippie counterculture cousins, for whom political organizations of any stripe seemed so very unhip. While the political types signed petitions and planned rallies, most hippies sought to “drop out.”
The hippie counterculture sported a playful worship of youth, spontaneity, and “authenticity,” a personal striving often facilitated by heavy use of psychedelic drugs. LSD, synthesized in a Swiss lab in the late 1930s, was first outlawed in the United States in 1966; possession of the drug was bumped up to a felony offense in 1968. Until that time, the psychedelic had fascinated straight-laced chemists and psychologists as well as long-haired hippies. The Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army sponsored research on effects of LSD at government laboratories and reputable research universities throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Along with psychedelics enthusiast Ken Kesey, for example, the physicist Nick Herbert, who would become a founding member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, was introduced to LSD by psychologists at Stanford University. Only later, over the course of the 1960s, did the drug seep into wider circulation among hordes of “tuned-in” youth. Long after the drug had been criminalized, LSD and other psychedelics, like psilocybin (from “magic mushrooms”), remained staple elements of the hippie counterculture.
New Age enthusiasms had also been mixed up in the hippies’ heady brew right from the start: everything from Eastern mysticism to extrasensory perception (ESP), unidentified flying objects (UFOs), Tarot card reading, and more. Research on LSD during the 1950s was often reported in parapsychology journals in between articles on mind-reading and reincarnation. Americans’ awareness of Eastern religions and healing practices, such as acupuncture, grew sharply following 1965 revisions to U.S. immigration law, after which immigration from Asia soared (having previously been capped by tight quotas). Some of the earliest underground tabloids of the budding counterculture—newspapers like the Oracle, peddled in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood beginning in 1966—featured news about yoga, astrology, and the occult alongside information on where to score the most potent psychedelic drugs. According to close observers, the hippie counterculture and New Age movements in the United States had fused by the early 1970s, achieving a critical mass, self-awareness, and no shortage of critics. Even so, the boundaries of the counterculture remained porous. One analyst likened it to a medieval crusade, a “procession constantly in flux, acquiring and losing members all along the route of march.”
The inherent tensions that historians have begun to identify within the hippie counterculture—leftist but not “New Left,” curious about the workings of the world but tempted by psychedelic escapism—help explain the wide range of followers whom the Fundamental Fysiks Group inspired. Their efforts attracted equally fervent support from stalwarts of the military-industrial complex as from storied cultivators of flower power, from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and defense-contractor laboratories like the Stanford Research Institute to the Esalen Institute. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group exemplified these tensions themselves. Many threw themselves headlong into the New Age alchemy, even as they pursued serious questions at the heart of quantum theory. They shifted easily from weapons laboratories to communes, universities to ashrams.
All the while, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group pioneered a flood of publications about the new physics and its broader implications. Many sold handsomely; some netted national awards. Best known today are such cultural icons as The Tao of Physics (1975) by physicist and group member Fritjof Capra and The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) by the writer Gary Zukav, at the time an avid participant in the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s discussions and roommate of one of its founding members. The group also experimented with alternate ways to spread their message, inspired by and modeled on the counter-culture’s underground press. The group’s efforts helped to bring sustained attention to the interpretation of quantum mechanics back into the classroom. And in a few critical instances, their work instigated major breakthroughs that—with hindsight—we may now recognize as laying crucial groundwork for quantum information science.
Reprinted from HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Taken From Scientific American
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