How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.1261
In How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, David Kaiser contends that a small group of graduate students “planted the seeds that would eventually flower into today’s field of quantum information science.” He would like to have us believe that this self-titled Fundamental Fysiks Group, 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.”
Starting in May 1975, the Fundamental Fysiks Group met weekly at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Their primary concern was the exploration of the foundations of quantum mechanics in search of explanations for parapsychological, or ‘psi,’ phenomena. From the “spooky actions at a distance” phenomena in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) gedanken experiment, the Fysiks Group was led to hidden-variables descriptions of quantum mechanics and to Bell’s theorem.
Kaiser argues that these hippie-physicists “saved physics” in three ways. First, “They self-consciously opened up space again for freewheeling speculation . . . that the cold war decades had dampened [and] sought to recapture the big-picture search for meaning that had driven their heroes–Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger.” Second, they “rescued” Bell’s theorem “from a decade of unrelenting obscurity.” And third, their “tireless efforts” to explore whether Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement might unlock the secrets of mental telepathy and extrasensory perception, or even enable contact with spirits of the dead, instigated the no-cloning theorem and thus “gave force to quantum encryption.”
Kaiser is a master storyteller, a very good physicist, and a fine historian. The book is dazzlingly researched. We learn a great deal about the background of the members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, which included founders Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissman, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, and Fred Alan Wolf. We also learn about the group’s connection to Uri Geller and to Ira Einhorn and about the group’s involvement with the CIA. It brings to light connections usually not considered when dealing with 20th century physics, for example, the marketing success of such books as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Shambhala Publications, 1975) and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (HarperCollins, 1979). Also, Kaiser’s narration of the physics he presents is accurate and accessible, including his explanations of the no-cloning and Bell’s theorems, and his descriptions of the EPR paper, John Wheeler’s commitment to a “participatory universe,” and Alain Aspect’s 1982 delayed-choice experiment.
For these reasons I am deeply concerned that Kaiser’s thesis, which magnifies and embellishes the role of the Fysiks Group, will lead the general public to believe that the group’s concerns with consciousness and extrasensory phenomena were in the same ballpark as Eugene Wigner’s analyses of the foundations of quantum theory. Wigner’s philosophical horizons had been broadened in the mid 1950s by PhD physics student Abner Shimony, who came to him with a PhD in philosophy. In 1962 and 1963, Wigner published articles on the quantum theory of measurement; in a 1962 paper addressing the mind–body problem, he outlined the concepts and language in terms of which quantum mechanics “teaches us to store and communicate information, to describe the regularities found in nature.” In it he also gave a brief exposition of John von Neumann’s mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, which emphasized that “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
The claim that the Fundamental Fysiks Group rescued Bell’s theorem from a decade of unrelenting obscurity is not accurate, nor is Kaiser’s statement that foundational issues in quantum mechanics were not being addressed. In a chapter on measurements, David Bohm’s Quantum Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1951) had introduced a generation of physicists to some of the difficulties and shortcomings of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. And Kurt Gottfried in his Quantum Mechanics: Fundamentals (Addison-Wesley, 1966) clearly indicated what the macroscopic nature of the measuring apparatus implied, and he anticipated some of the insights of decoherence theory.
That Bell’s papers did not suffer from a decade of unrelenting obscurity prior to 1975 is corroborated in and by Joan Bromberg’s highly informative interviews with Shimony and John Clauser—interviews that Kaiser refers to extensively in chapter 3; Clauser’s 1969 paper in which he proposed an experiment to test local hidden-variable theories; the critical 1969 paper by Clauser, Michael Horne, Shimony, and Richard Holt on the same subject; Wigner’s 1970 paper on the derivation of Bell’s inequality; and the 1973 publication of Frederik Belinfante’s 350-page monograph, A Survey of Hidden-Variables Theories (Pergamon Press).
Kaiser is justified in giving Nick Herbert, a peripheral member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, credit for a 1979 proposal of a possible superluminal device that led to the 1982 formulation of the no-cloning theorem. However, as Kaiser himself makes clear, things had changed from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s—for one, delayed-choice experiments, such as the one by Aspect and his collaborators, had become a central focus—and the thread of connection between the Fundamental Fysiks Group and quantum encryption had become much more tenuous.
The civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the Vietnam War, and the student rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s undoubtedly mark a profound, multifaceted transitional period in US history. As in Weimar Germany, such social upheavals made possible creative, sometimes radical, new viewpoints. However, accounting for their impact on physics is not an easy matter. True, as Kaiser states, the Fundamental Fysiks Group did manage to parlay its interest into a widespread cultural phenomenon while “hovering on the margins of mainstream physics”—a reflection, no doubt, of the group’s public relations talents, particularly Sarfatti’s and Einhorn’s.
But being a member of the physics community demands that communal interests and standards be valued above the ego and self-absorption of the individual. In “The Depth and Breadth of John Bell’s Physics,” submitted to arXiv.org in 2001, Roman Jackiw and Shimony declared that with Bell’s death the world had lost “a man of exemplary dedication, integrity, courage, modesty, generosity, and humanity.” A more explicit comparison in How the Hippies Saved Physics of Fundamental Fysiks Group members to Bell, Wigner, and others involved would have been welcome.
More about the Authors
Silvan (Sam) Schweber is professor emeritus of physics and of the history of ideas at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and an associate in the history of science department at Harvard University.
