Quantum
HEALTH
Issue 13 September/October 2011
HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS: SCIENCE, COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE QUANTUM REVIVAL By David Kaiser
Reviewed by Joan Parisi Wilcox
LSD. ESP. Quantum physics. What do they have in common? The Fundamental Fysiks Group—a band of science nerds who refused to “shut up and calculate” and instead decided to grapple with the grandest questions of being, existence, and what it all really means.
Professor David Kaiser, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, takes us on an entertaining and meticulously researched ride through the counterculture of physics as led by the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” a dozen or so PhD students and working physicists whose intellectual
curiosity and unapologetic rebelliousness served to keep physics honest at a time when the academic establishment raised equations to the throne and kept the crowd of philosophical questions far outside the palace gates.
During the Cold War period, physicists were busy working for the military-industrial complex, private industry, and academic institutions that were all about application, application, application. Gone were the days of Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and other physicists musing long into the night about how quantum theory could “possibly be like that” (meaning, strange and stranger still) and wondering what the “new physics” was telling us about reality. That is until the 1960s and 1970s, when a group of mostly Berkeley, California, physics graduate students decided that the big questions about what the weird world of quantum said about the everyday world and reality at large were not only worth asking but also were what made being a physicist meaningful. Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann formed the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and were soon joined in regular late night (and often drug-enhanced) sessions by Fritjof Capra, Nick Herbert, Fred Alan Wolf, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti and John Clauser, among others. This merry band of serious science pranksters, according to Kasier, changed the face of physics, returning it to its philosophical roots of
40 Quantum Health
exploring the mysteries about reality that were raised by quantum physics—and in the process they helped birth the science of quantum cryptography and other modern offshoots of physics.
As engaging as these larger-than-life hippie physicists are, you have to seriously like quantum physics to enjoy this book. It’s a history—an examination of culture and science—and Kaiser is a stickler for context and detail. Yet the story is fascinating, ranging as it does from accounts of physics lectures delivered nude in the hot spring-fed baths at Esalen to the accounts of the patronage of such “gurus” as Werner Eckherd, from LSD and mescaline enhanced meetings to down-and- out postdocs being refused work in their fi eld because of their belief in exploring a possible link between ESP and quantum physics. What is most startling—and what most of us don’t know—is that some of the most well-accepted aspects of quantum theory were roundly rejected or ignored during this period by the academic physics community, not for their science but because they dealt with the underlying interpretative aspects of physics instead of experimental data and equations. The prime example is Bell’s Theorem, which today is deemed one of the most important advances in physics in modern times. It showed that Einstein was wrong— nonlocality (those “spooky actions at a distance”) is real. Bell’s work was virtually ignored, as were John Clauser’s and Alan Aspect’s experiments proving the theory and demonstrating with impeccable surety that the world at the smallest level is “entangled.” What kept this knowledge alive and in play in physics were the efforts of the “fysiks.”
These radical physicists paid dearly for living their beliefs, facing scorn and ridicule especially for their pursuit of exploring possible links between quantum theory and paranormal phenomenon, such as remote viewing and ESP. Today, many of them remain among the diehard explorers of psi phenomenon and several of them have become bestselling authors and much- in-demand lecturers popularising quantum theory. If you want to know how some of the physics media darlings—and a few of the stars of the fi lm What the BLEEP Do We Know?— got their start, this is the book for you. And if you want to be entertained by a band of hippie physicists while learning about the serious issue of how culture and science clash—and how science is far from the objective discipline it claims to be—then this also is the book for you.
US Hardcover, WW Norton & Company, ISBN 978-0- 393-07636-3, $26.95
Also available as an ebook and in audio format. Available in the UK in January 2012.
www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
Book Review
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