The new visibility invited concerted pushback. As Zukav and Sarfatti learned the hard way, commercial publishing operated under its own rules and constraints. The physicists could get the word out, but not all messages would flourish under the informal strictures of the marketplace. Einhorn’s network also proved to be less robust than it had first appeared. In the end, the network depended on the whimsy of an idiosyncratic individual and the goodwill of a few highly placed corporate executives; it had little secure institutional backing. Einhorn’s network ended as abruptly as it had begun, once Einhorn was no longer in a position to carry it on.
The first hint that trouble might be brewing came in November 1977. Einhorn had worked with Andrija Puharich to organize an international conference on quantum mechanics and parapsychology, building on the successes of their conferences at Penn and Harvard. With funding from a private foundation based in London, the meeting was to be held in Reykjavík, Iceland, and feature presentations from many in what Einhorn jokingly called his “psychic mafia,” including Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ from the Stanford Research Institute psi lab, Elizabeth Rauscher from the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and Evan Harris Walker from the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground. The meeting went ahead as planned, but at the last moment Einhorn failed to show up. His longtime girlfriend had just left him, he said, and his behavior had become a bit erratic.66
In fact, his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, had been missing since early September. Even when authorities feared the worst—that Maddux had been the victim of foul play—few could imagine that peace-loving Einhorn, the New Age guru of Philadelphia, could have had anything to do with Maddux’s disappearance. Maddux’s family, back in Texas, was less convinced. They hired a retired FBI agent as a private detective to look more closely into Einhorn. Eighteen months later, police executed a search warrant at the Unicorn’s apartment, where they found the victim’s rotting corpse stuffed into a trunk. Her skull had suffered multiple fractures; she had been beaten beyond recognition.67 (Fig. 6.3.)
FIGURE 6.3. Investigators remove a trunk containing Holly Maddux’s remains from Ira Einhorn’s apartment in Philadelphia in March 1979. (Associated Press/Temple University Archives.)
The murder case shocked friends and foes alike. The front-page headline in the Philadelphia Daily News—“‘Hippie Guru’ held in trunk slaying”—eclipsed the other news of the day: the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown in nearby Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Einhorn’s lawyer for the arraignment hearing was a young Philadelphia defense attorney named Arlen Specter, who was about to embark on his successful campaign for the United States Senate. Specter convinced the judge to release Einhorn on just a fraction of the bail that the prosecutor had demanded. Central to Specter’s case was a parade of character witnesses, including Einhorn’s benefactors from Bell Telephone, who proclaimed that the peace-loving, intellectual, environmental-activist Einhorn could not possibly have been guilty of so hideous a crime. At the very least, Specter continued, Einhorn, Philadelphia’s native son, posed little flight risk.68
Specter’s persuasion worked. Despite the murder charges and the gruesome evidence retrieved from Einhorn’s apartment, the judge set bail at just $40,000 (about $120,000 in 2010 dollars). Pennsylvania law required that only 10 percent of the total, a mere $4000, be paid up front. Even that modest sum hovered a good bit above what Einhorn could afford. A wealthy heiress in Montreal, who had been an avid follower of Einhorn’s network mailings, stepped in and put up the cash after conferring with Fundamental Fysiks Group organizer Elizabeth Rauscher (who, like most of Einhorn’s confederates, could not imagine that Einhorn was guilty).69
Several of Einhorn’s friends at Pennsylvania Bell privately believed that Einhorn must be innocent. Nonetheless, the telephone company immediately halted all operations of Einhorn’s network, fearing bad publicity.70 Just like that, Einhorn’s international network—the main conduit for preprints and press releases by members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group—fell silent. Others tried to rig up their own replacements. Within a year, Jack Sarfatti had begun mailing items to what he dubbed his “Quantum Communications Network,” a list including fifty-seven names and organizations, many of whom, as in Einhorn’s original network, had not asked to be included. Yet the later imitations never achieved Einhorn’s reach or scale.71
Einhorn, meanwhile, chose to interpret the phrase “released on bail” rather liberally. He made frequent trips outside the Philadelphia area, first to California to check in at Esalen and then to hang out in San Francisco for a while. He met up with Jack Sarfatti in Sarfatti’s unofficial headquarters (Caffe Trieste, North Beach). After hearing him out, Sarfatti organized a meeting at which Einhorn could tell his side of the story. Several members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group attended. (Tongue in cheek, Sarfatti described Einhorn’s trip as “Ira’s confessional passage to the Monastery of Esalen in Big Sur where he was to be absolved of all guilt.”) The main impression Einhorn left on his listeners was his outward calm. “He certainly didn’t act as if he did it,” Sarfatti later told a journalist.72
A few weeks after the California jaunt, Einhorn actually left the country, traveling to Montreal to visit the heiress who had posted his bail. These short forays proved to be test runs for what was to come. Just weeks before his murder trial was set to begin, Einhorn and his new girlfriend fled to London.73 Under a series of assumed names, he managed to elude authorities for nearly two decades, ultimately settling in the south of France. While he was on the lam, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office went ahead with its murder trial in 1993. In one more bizarre twist to an already bizarre case, Einhorn was convicted in absentia of the murder charges, a rarity in U.S. law.74
In the late 1990s, Einhorn’s luck began to run out. FBI agents and Interpol colleagues tracked him down.75 Even then it seemed Einhorn might receive a reprieve: France refused to extradite the fugitive, citing a policy of not returning individuals to nations in which they might face the death penalty. The diplomatic crisis reached the highest echelons. Thirty-five members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to French president Jacques Chirac urging Einhorn’s extradition; Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Attorney General Janet Reno personally intervened with their French counterparts.76 The Pennsylvania state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill specifically in reference to Einhorn’s case that allowed defendants who had been convicted in absentia to request a new trial. The bill, officially titled the “Post Conviction Relief Act” but known informally as the “Einhorn law,” quickly attracted critics, who challenged the constitutionality of such a legislative incursion into the judicial branch’s domain.77
All the while Einhorn enjoyed a peaceful life in the French countryside. His country home, he told a visiting journalist, betrayed a “touch of Eden.” He even got to partake in the wonders of the Internet, networking at light speed rather than relying on the old mechanisms of photocopier and postage stamp. He created an email account—his address, [email protected], appropriately anonymous—and began corresponding daily with members of his former network. He bragged to a reporter in 1999 that he had received about 9000 emails from Jack Sarfatti alone.78 (Those who know Sarfatti will recognize that as a low-ball figure.)
After four years of wrangling, the French released Einhorn to U.S. authorities in July 2001. For one thing, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office clarified that at the time Einhorn was arrested, the State of Pennsylvania did not have the death penalty on its books. (It was added later.) That meant that Einhorn could not face the ultimate punishment. Moreover, the Philadelphia courts agreed to conduct a new trial of Einhorn, rather than let the in absentia verdict stand.79
The new trial began in autumn 2002, capping a case with more than its share of legal curiosities. Einhorn claimed that the prosecution had tampered with witnesses and withheld evidence during the 1993 trial, although no independent corroboration of these allegations surfaced.80 In a separate development, a Philadelphia jury awarded a record-
breaking $907 million verdict in a wrongful death suit brought against Einhorn in civil court by Maddux’s family, after he had surfaced in France but before extradition had been secured.81 (The family wanted to ensure that Einhorn could not profit from selling his story.) Meanwhile, the transcript of Einhorn’s 1979 arraignment hearing—at which a dozen witnesses had testified to Einhorn’s upstanding character, including two Bell Telephone executives who described, for an incredulous judge, their role in facilitating Einhorn’s network—vanished into thin air. City and county clerks continue to point fingers. Einhorn claims that the disappearing transcript is part of a larger government conspiracy against him.82
The trial in 2002 electrified Philadelphia. Hundreds of people flocked to the courthouse to catch a glimpse of the aging guru; some camped out all night to secure a ticket to one of the few seats in the crowded courtroom.83 The prosecutors argued (as they had maintained ever since Maddux’s body was discovered in Einhorn’s apartment) that Einhorn killed Maddux in a jealous rage: she had just met a new man and had returned to the apartment to pick up her last items before moving out. Einhorn countered with his own theory which, like the prosecution’s, had changed little since 1979. As far as Einhorn was concerned, he had been framed for Maddux’s murder by the CIA, the KGB, or both. His work on Uri Geller, which by the late 1970s had expanded into all manner of parapsychological topics, was getting too close to top-secret psychic warfare plans, he maintained. His network, distributing the latest psi theories from members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, had to be stopped. Einhorn argued that dark forces—deep-cover intelligence agents working for one or another of the world’s superpowers—had killed Holly Maddux in order to silence him.84
Despite their early support, few (if any) members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group lend Einhorn’s conspiracy theory much credence today. The Swedish woman whom Einhorn had married while on the run pleaded with Sarfatti and others to testify on Einhorn’s behalf at the new trial, but Sarfatti kept his distance.85 In October 2002, the jury deliberated for two hours before finding Einhorn guilty of first-degree murder. The presiding judge dismissed Einhorn, who had once inspired world-renowned scholars, multinational corporations, and major publishing firms, as “an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting, and inexperienced people.” Today Einhorn sits in a Pennsylvania prison, serving a life sentence with no possibility for parole. He spends his time honing a treatise on what he considers to be a grave miscarriage of justice.86 Most observers agree, however, that Ira Einhorn killed more than just the physicists’ special preprint network.
Chapter 7
Zen and the Art of Textbook Publishing
Capra is an engaging teacher…. Here is the kind of physics one should have had in high school, instead of the grey formulae which hung in the school laboratory like eminent ancestors whom one could never live up to, let alone surpass.
—A. Dull, 1978
Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, catalyzed by Ira Einhorn and his contacts at major publishing firms, helped to launch a new type of popular book in the 1970s: accessible books that compared striking features of modern physics, such as Bell’s theorem and nonlocality, with staples of the counterculture and New Age revivals, from parapsychology to Eastern mysticism. Some of the books enjoyed critical acclaim, and many achieved commercial success. But the books served to do more than introduce members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group and their enthusiasms to new audiences. Several operated in multiple registers, blurring genres that usually remained distinct: both popular book for the masses and textbook for science students. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975, remains the most emblematic and successful of the group’s efforts in this domain. Capra’s Tao exemplifies the hybrid nature of the new books, and the diverse roles they came to play.
Capra had met key members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group in the course of his writing, including Elizabeth Rauscher, George Weissmann, Fred Alan Wolf, and Jack Sarfatti. (In fact, after Sarfatti and Capra met in London via David Bohm in the fall of 1973, Sarfatti stayed with Capra and his parents in Innsbruck during a brief holiday. They crossed paths again that spring at Abdus Salam’s International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy.) Capra returned to Berkeley just as his book was coming out, long before it had become the runaway best-seller we know it as today. Still relatively unknown, Capra spoke about his book and its larger themes—the multiple parallels, as Capra saw them, between the worldviews of modern physics and Eastern mysticism—at the first sessions of the Fundamental Fysiks Group in May 1975. Capra helped to organize a follow-up series of discussions about the book and its larger themes at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory the next year, filled with regular members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. He became a core member of the group, participating as well in various Physics/Consciousness Research Group activities and Esalen workshops.1
By that time the book, like its author, had already traveled a long route. Austrian-born Capra completed his PhD in theoretical particle physics at the University of Vienna in 1966, and moved on to a postdoctoral fellowship in Paris. There he witnessed the student uprisings and general strikes of May 1968, scenes that left a deep impression on him. He also met a senior physicist from the University of California at Santa Cruz who was spending some sabbatical time in Paris. The professor invited Capra to Santa Cruz for a follow-up postdoctoral fellowship, which Capra gladly accepted. He arrived in Santa Cruz in September 1968.2
Capra broadened his horizons on many fronts in California. As he later wrote, he led “a somewhat schizophrenic life” in Santa Cruz: hardworking quantum physicist by day, tuned-in hippie by night. He continued his political education, already stoked by the Paris of 1968: he went to lectures and rallies by the Black Panthers; he protested against the war in Vietnam. He took in “the rock festivals, the psychedelics, the new sexual freedom, the communal living” that had become de rigueur among the Santa Cruz counterculture set. He also began exploring Eastern religions and mysticism—an interest originally sparked by his filmmaker brother—by reading essays and attending lectures by Alan Watts, a local expert on all things Eastern who had assisted Esalen’s Michael Murphy in his continuing investigations of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and the rest.3
In the midst of these explorations, Capra had a powerful experience on the beach at Santa Cruz during the summer of 1969. Watching the ocean waves roll in and out, he fell into a kind of trance. As he later described it, the physical processes all around him took on a new immediacy: the vibrations of atoms and molecules in the sand, rocks, and water; the showers of high-energy cosmic rays striking the atmosphere from outer space; all these were more than the formulas and graphs he had studied in the classroom. He felt them in a new, visceral way. They were, he gleaned, the Dance of Shiva from Hindu mythology. He began to notice similar parallels between cutting-edge quantum theory and central tenets of Eastern thought: the emphasis upon wholeness or interconnectedness, for example, or upon dynamic interactions rather than static entities.4
In December 1970, his visa about to expire, Capra returned to Europe. With no new job lined up, he began to check in with some of his contacts to see if he might find some steady position. He wandered into the theoretical physics division at London’s Imperial College, whose leader he had met in California. The physicist had no fellowships to offer—finances had become as difficult for British physicists as for their American colleagues by that time—but with the financial downturn there were at least some empty desks around. And so Capra set up shop at Imperial: no position, no income, but a tiny corner of office space he could call his own.5
His financial situation quickly grew dim. He took on private tutoring jobs; he did some freelance work writing abstracts of recent physics articles for the Physikalische Berichte. When he could spare the time, he delved more deeply into his readings of Eastern texts, inspired as much by Alan Watts’s teachings as by his own mystical experience on the beach. And he hatche
d a plan to put some of his hard-won physics knowledge to use: he would write a textbook on his beloved subject of quantum physics. If he could write the book quickly enough, he reasoned—and if he could get a major textbook publisher interested in the project—he might pull out of his financial tailspin. Not only that, the textbook might make him a more attractive candidate for a teaching position down the road.6
By November 1972 he had drawn up an outline for the book and begun drafting chapters. He reached out to another contact for advice: MIT’s Victor Weisskopf, whom he had met at a recent summer school in Italy. Weisskopf, like Capra a native of Vienna, was by that time a grand old man of the profession. He had recently completed a term as director general of CERN, the multinational high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, where John Bell made his career. By the time Capra sought Weisskopf’s advice, the elder physicist was well into a sideline career as a successful popular-science writer. He had also published a highly influential textbook on nuclear physics—a book that held the honor, Weisskopf was always happy to recount, of having been the book most frequently stolen from the MIT libraries. Weisskopf had suggested the idea to Capra of writing a textbook when they met at the summer school. Capra sent his chapter outline to Weisskopf, hoping for some further encouragement. He also hoped his senior colleague would use his contacts to help line up a publisher and secure an advance payment in anticipation of future royalties.7
How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival Page 18
