How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

by Kaiser, David

  FIGURE 6.2. Preprint of a 1973 paper by Jack Sarfatti and Fred Alan Wolf, circulated by Ira Einhorn. The list of recipients appears at the bottom of the page, in Einhorn’s handwriting. (John A. Wheeler papers, American Philosophical Society, Sarfatti folder, reproduced courtesy Fred Alan Wolf.)

  With his network reaching ever more people and his fame spilling far beyond Philadelphia, Einhorn’s star rose higher still. He received an invitation to spend a semester at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, tucked within the university’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. (Einhorn finally got a fellowship at Harvard, a decade after Kuhn had tried to get him into Harvard’s Society of Fellows.) The other fellows included public officials from state and local governments across the country, as well as a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea.40 Einhorn intoned at panel discussions on the current state of politics and culture, and he delighted in sizing up the Harvard population. “My new consciousness was reinforced by LSD, dope, and the loving I was doing,” he explained to a young female reporter for the Harvard Crimson. “The kids here are incredibly bright, but everything is just so structured. There’s simply no time to interact, relax, or enjoy yourself,” he continued. Then he shot her a smile. “It’s like you have to schedule your fucking.”41

  On campus and off, Einhorn parlayed his stature to further the cause of physics and consciousness. Together with Puharich, he organized a series of conferences on mind and matter, first at the University of Pennsylvania and later in Harvard’s brand-new Science Center. He stepped up his visits to the West Coast as well, dropping in at Esalen and taking detours to the Bay Area to check in with members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group.42

  Beyond the personal visits and network mailings, Einhorn helped the physicists reach a still larger audience. With his usual charm and persistence, he had forged an unusual alliance with Bill Whitehead, an editor at Anchor Books, a subsidiary of the large New York publishing firm Doubleday. Whitehead’s task had been to build up the press’s list in psychology. He interpreted that mandate broadly, tilting more and more toward parapsychology, the human potential movement, and Eastern mysticism. Whitehead’s timing was impeccable. By tapping into the burgeoning New Age movement, many of his selections became commercial successes, and before long he had been promoted within Doubleday and then lured over to Dutton Books. At Dutton he rose to the rank of editor-in-chief, and Einhorn came along for the ride. In Einhorn, Whitehead had a first-class ticket to a pool of potential authors; and Einhorn, in turn, exercised outsized influence on what books made it into print.43

  Among his first successes, Einhorn convinced Whitehead to republish Puharich’s Beyond Telepathy, the book that had first captured Einhorn’s imagination in the early 1960s. Not everyone had been as enamored as Einhorn, and Puharich’s book had gone out of print. No problem: a reprint of Beyond Telepathy—complete with a new preface by Einhorn himself—came out in Whitehead’s series in 1973, followed, one year later, by Puharich’s rambling Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller. In Uri, Puharich expanded upon the by-then familiar Geller feats. Not just mind reading and spoon bending; now there were tales of extraterrestrial contacts and the teleportation of Puharich’s briefcase from the Ossining ranch to Geller’s Tel Aviv apartment. Puharich acknowledged in the opening pages that “Ira Einhorn’s imagination helped to formulate this book and to get it to the attention of publishers,” and that editor Bill Whitehead’s “cool judgment and courage got the book published.”44

  Soon Einhorn was getting other colleagues in on the act. Bob Toben, a high-school pal of Fundamental Fysiks Group member Fred Alan Wolf’s, had become intrigued by Uri Geller and reports of related paranormal phenomena. He wrote a short article about the latest mysteries for an obscure underground journal that caught Einhorn’s eye. Soon the Unicorn had set up Toben with his own book contract in Whitehead’s series. Toben had little scientific background, so he teamed up with Wolf and Jack Sarfatti to write a popular book speculating on how modern physics might account for Geller’s psychic fireworks. They began brainstorming together in California a few months before Sarfatti and Wolf set off for their European foray. Toben flew to Europe to continue working with them. Much of the book was planned out in a favorite Parisian café, while Sarfatti was in “an altered state of consciousness.” Toben then put the finishing touches on the manuscript at Puharich’s Ossining estate, Einhorn in tow. With Einhorn’s help, Space-Time and Beyond: Toward an Explanation of the Unexplainable appeared in 1974. A curious hybrid, the book consisted of a hundred pages of pen-and-ink cartoons by Toben offering a hip, New Age guide for the perplexed, followed by dense scientific appendices with quotations cobbled from Sarfatti’s and Wolf’s favorite sources, such as physicists Eugene Wigner and John Wheeler. And it sold; Einhorn had gauged the market well. The first edition sold about 50,000 copies. Translations appeared in German and Japanese, and a second English edition, brought out by Bantam a few years later, sold handsomely as well.45

  Space-Time and Beyond presaged a wave of popular books. That same year the Esalen Institute Publishing Program, in conjunction with Viking Press, published Lawrence LeShan’s The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal. LeShan, trained as a psychologist and deep into parapsychology by the late 1960s, had already been in contact with Bob Toben before their books came out.46 While working in Europe on Space-Time and Beyond, meanwhile, Sarfatti met up with Fritjof Capra, another physicist interested in the grand mysteries of quantum theory and their possible ties to mysticism. Capra had no connection yet to Einhorn or Whitehead; he would enter Einhorn’s network later, after moving to Berkeley and joining the Fundamental Fysiks Group. In the meantime, Capra endured dozens of publishers’ rejections before a small press took a gamble on his book The Tao of Physics.47

  The genre really only took off once the Fundamental Fysiks Group was up and running. The members’ raw enthusiasm, combined with Einhorn’s bookselling sense, made a potent combination. Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp remembers a party at his house in 1975 for the Fundamental Fysiks Group, following one of his presentations. As the party stretched late into the night, Stapp looked around his backyard. He overheard several clusters of people hatching plans for the best-selling books they intended to write; the mood, Stapp recalls, was one of exuberance. In short order, they began making good on those plans.48

  Several of the early books took shape in Arthur Young’s Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, which had served for years as a frequent stomping ground and sometime residence for members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Young’s institute had also become a favorite destination for Einhorn during his California trips; Young, in turn, became an early member of Einhorn’s network. When Young, a former aeronautical engineer, began working on two books about his own theories about physics and consciousness, Einhorn lent a hand. He edited several drafts of Young’s The Reflexive Universe: Evolution of Consciousness and The Geometry of Meaning, both of which appeared in 1976. (Young thanked Einhorn in his acknowledgments, alongside Young’s onetime protégé and tenant, Fundamental Fysiks Group member Saul-Paul Sirag.)49 Not long after that, Sirag contributed his own chapter on physics and consciousness to George Leonard’s The Silent Pulse, published by Einhorn’s editor-friend Bill Whitehead. Like Young, Leonard—an Esalen fixture and proponent of “humanistic psychology”—had been a member of Einhorn’s network for years.50

  Jeffrey Mishlove crossed paths with Einhorn at Young’s institute; they enjoyed a game of Go whenever the Unicorn was in town. Mishlove, a Berkeley graduate student, first connected with Sirag and Sarfatti at Young’s institute as well, before joining the Fundamental Fysiks Group discussions. His best-selling book, The Roots of Consciousness: Psychic Liberation through History, Science, and Experience, appeared in 1975, complete with a lengthy appendix by Jack Sarfatti on “the physical roots of consciousness.” The book began as a kind of proof-of-principle. Mishlove was hard at work on what would become the first d
octorate in parapsychology awarded in the United States. Before his graduate-school committee would allow him to jump into a dissertation on the topic, they required him to write an extensive report on the history and current status of parapsychology. The enterprising Mishlove—who was also running his own local radio show about the paranormal and helping arrange large events in the Bay Area, such as Uri Geller’s famous performance in 1973 before a standing-room-only crowd of 1500 people in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Auditorium—turned his homework assignment into a major publishing opportunity.51

  Then came Gary Zukav’s book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Zukav had been Jack Sarfatti’s roommate in North Beach, San Francisco, and he frequently tagged along with Jack to meetings of the Fundamental Fysiks Group and the Physics/Consciousness Research Group.52 Sarfatti also invited Zukav to attend the first “Physics and consciousness” workshop at Esalen in January 1976. The meeting left a deep impression on Zukav; it also introduced him to even more tuned-in physicists. Zukav crafted his entire book around discussions at the Esalen workshop, entitling the first chapter “Big week at Big Sur.” As he wrote in the opening pages, “I had spoken often to Jack Sarfatti, who is the physicist director of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group, about the possibility of writing a book, unencumbered with technicalities and mathematics, to explain the exciting insights that motivate current physics. So when he invited me to a conference on physics that he and Michael Murphy were arranging at the Esalen Institute, I accepted with a purpose.” David Finkelstein, another physicist whom Zukav met at the Esalen workshop, contributed a preface; Zukav acknowledged Sarfatti and Finkelstein as the “godfathers of this book.” He went on to thank most members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group for further help: Henry Stapp, Elizabeth Rauscher, John Clauser, George Weissmann, Fred Alan Wolf, Fritjof Capra, Saul-Paul Sirag, and Nick Herbert. But the real star of the book—at least in the first edition—remained Sarfatti. The entire discussion, ranging over relativity, quantum theory, Bell’s theorem, and nonlocality, marched toward a concluding chapter that focused on Sarfatti’s still-fresh ideas about quantum entanglement and psychic phenomena.53

  The book’s unusual title came from Esalen’s resident T’ai Chi master, Al Huang. At dinner one evening, early in the month-long physics workshop, Huang had explained that the Chinese word for physics was “Wu Li,” which could be translated literally as “patterns of organic energy.” The evocative phrase captured everyone’s imagination. Huang had gone on to explain that the Chinese characters making up “Wu Li” could also mean a variety of notions, depending on the spoken inflection or intonation. The term could be translated as “my way,” “nonsense,” “I clutch my ideas,” or “enlightenment,” each connoting a more individualistic, epistemic bent than the English word “physics.” The physicists sitting around the table began to chime in: the richness of the term seemed an eerie match for the direction their own research had taken them, from quantum physics to the nature of consciousness. Zukav now had the outline for his book. He divided his discussion into sections, each labeled by one of the meanings of “Wu Li.”54

  Despite the similarity in title to Fritjof Capra’s iconic book The Tao of Physics, Zukav’s point in Dancing Wu Li Masters was not to draw out parallels between modern physics and insights from ancient Eastern religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism. Rather, Zukav focused on the development of quantum physics and relativity in the West. Taking inspiration from the T’ai Chi master’s lesson about the many meanings of “Wu Li,” Zukav introduced readers to a particular view of how to interpret the startling discoveries. He dwelled upon suggestive statements from the likes of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about the importance of the role of the observer in quantum mechanics, since our choices of what to measure and how to interact with quantum systems change the very systems under study. He drove the point home by quoting a long passage from John Wheeler’s still-obscure conference paper on the shift from “observers” to “participators,” which Jack Sarfatti had found so inspiring.55

  Zukav went further, writing that the emphasis upon the observer (or participator) meant that “Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way around.” He argued that quantum physics had at last shattered the illusion of objectivity:

  “The exact sciences” no longer study an objective reality that runs its course regardless of our interest in it or not, leaving us to fare as best we can while it goes its predetermined way. Science, at the level of subatomic events, is no longer exact, the distinction between objective and subjective has vanished, and the portals through which the universe manifests itself are, as we once knew a long time ago, those impotent, passive witnesses to its unfolding, the “I”s, of which we, insignificant we, are examples. The Cogs in the Machine have become the Creators of the Universe.

  Hence the significance of translations such as “my way” and “enlightenment” for “Wu Li”: “If the new physics has led us anywhere, it is back to ourselves, which, of course, is the only place that we could go.” Indeed, enthused Zukav, “Do not be surprised if physics curricula of the twenty-first century include classes in meditation.”56

  Like a spider suspended in amber, the first edition of Zukav’s book captured a moment in the ferment of the Fundamental Fysiks Group and Physics/Consciousness Research Group discussions. When introducing readers to the notion from relativity that space and time form a single, united thing called “space-time,” Zukav followed Sarfatti’s lead and likened the relativistic concept to Baba Ram Dass’s spiritual manual Be Here Now. Later chapters pursued Sarfatti’s interpretation of Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement. Zukav described Sarfatti’s latest schemes for how one might control Bell-styled nonlocality and use it to transmit signals faster than light. Zukav likewise emphasized possible links between Bell’s theorem and parapsychological phenomena such as the remote-viewing results of Stanford Research Institute physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ.57

  In fact, the entire framework for the book followed a Physics/Consciousness Research Group model. Just two weeks after the Esalen workshop that Zukav had attended, Sarfatti submitted a follow-up grant proposal to Werner Erhard’s charitable foundation, seeking further funding for the PCRG. He included a packet of photographs from the Esalen meeting, emphasizing on the first page that “This is the kind of experience supported by your donations.” One photo showed Sarfatti and T’ai Chi master Al Huang sitting together in deep repose. The caption read: “Sarfatti and T’ai Chi Master, Al Huang, doing Wu-Li. Wu-Li is the Chinese word for physics. It also means pattern of organic movement. It also means ‘nonsense,’ ‘my way,’ ‘enlightenment,’ and ‘I clutch my ideas,’ depending on the pronunciation of ‘li.’”58

  Sarfatti had been planning his own follow-up book. In a proposal that he drew up just as Zukav’s book was hitting the shelves, Sarfatti emphasized that books like his own Space-Time and Beyond, Capra’s Tao of Physics, and Zukav’s Dancing Wu Li Masters had created a robust market for discussions of physics and consciousness.59 But Sarfatti’s latest book never materialized. Instead, Zukav’s book hit something of a speed bump, revealing the limits as well as the promise of communicating ideas in the form of flashy trade-press books. The earlier books had been relatively small-scale affairs that happened to do well commercially—sleeper hits or cult classics rather than major publishing events. (None of the earlier books, for example, received reviews in the New York Times upon first publication.) Their success raised the stakes. Zukav’s book received a major launch in 1979 and that brought out the critics. Several reviewers were quick to attack what they considered the book’s scientific infelicities, heaping scorn upon Zukav’s main informants. One physicist, reviewing the book in Physics Today, complained that Zukav had been too heavily influenced by “the ‘Physics/Consciousness’ movement of northern California, and its leading spokesman, Jack Sarfatti.” A New York Times reviewer likewise fumed that there was something “truly insidious about this tract-posing-as-primer,” parroti
ng, as it did, “the dubious notions of certain renegade physicists.”60

  Zukav snapped into crisis mode, rewriting several sections of the book before its second printing. The result: most of the references to Sarfatti hit the cutting-room floor, and Zukav dialed back the discussions of quantum-enabled telepathy and clairvoyance. All reference to the Physics/Consciousness Research Group disappeared; Zukav wrote simply that “a friend” (otherwise unnamed) had brought him to the Esalen workshop. The heavily edited closing chapter hewed more closely to Henry Stapp’s interpretation of Bell’s theorem (which made little room for ESP or clairvoyance), moving Sarfatti’s unorthodox ideas—followed by Stapp’s critique—to a footnote.61 Naturally Sarfatti felt betrayed, and not only for what he considered an Orwellian rewriting of history. Sarfatti accused Zukav of reneging on their earlier deal: Sarfatti said the deal had been for him to receive 10 percent of the royalties in exchange for his extensive coaching. Instead, Sarfatti claimed that Zukav used the money to pay for the last-minute revisions, including the expense of producing new plates for the second printing.62

  Although Zukav’s friendship with Sarfatti came to an abrupt end, the quick fix worked: The Dancing Wu Li Masters became a break-out success. Within its first four years the book went through nine printings; a paperback edition quickly sold another quarter million copies. The amended version received critical acclaim as well, sharing an American Book Award in 1980 with that other enduring favorite, Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. The prominent publishing house HarperCollins brought out a paperback edition of Zukav’s book in 2001 as part of its Perennial Classics series.63

  Einhorn and the Fundamental Fysiks Group thus forged some impressive, alternative tracks for putting their ideas into circulation. Einhorn’s network allowed Sarfatti, Wolf, Herbert, Rauscher and the others to sidestep physicists’ usual communication outlets. By easing their way into the commercial book-publishing world, Einhorn further spread word of the “new physics”—and its potential for parapsychology and an expanded worldview—to audiences far larger, and far more diverse, than physicists’ ordinary routines would have allowed. Indeed, Einhorn and the Fundamental Fysiks Group helped seed what one publisher called a new “popular metaphysics.”64 These were the first broad-market books devoted to the interpretation of quantum theory in more than two generations. Despite a surge of popular science writing in the United States after World War II, virtually no popular books (at least in English) had tackled the quantum puzzles and paradoxes that had so animated earlier physicists and popularizers like Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others in the 1930s and 1940s. Einhorn and the Fundamental Fysiks Group injected new energy and new source material into a dormant domain. In turn, books like Space-Time and Beyond, The Tao of Physics, and The Dancing Wu Li Masters inspired dozens of imitators during the 1980s and 1990s, jumpstarting a now-flourishing market for popular physics books on quantum theory and its mysteries.65