How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival
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Back and forth their letters flew: Weisskopf commenting on Capra’s proposal, and soon on individual chapter drafts; Capra thanking him for his comments but pressing again and again for more tangible forms of support. “As you know, the problem of financial support has become vital for me,” Capra responded in January 1973, “and I wonder whether I could approach a publisher for a contract” at that stage of the project. If so, which publisher would Weisskopf recommend, and would Weisskopf mind contacting the press directly to recommend the book? “I am sorry to bother you with these problems, but I have indeed very little time to work on the book at the moment, because I am not supported by anybody and have to make my living with much less creative work.” Weisskopf’s responses—asking for more drafts and sending along further comments—sidestepped the issues Capra found most pressing. Capra reiterated his urgent need to line up a publisher and get some financial support.8
A few weeks (and chapter drafts) later, Weisskopf addressed Capra’s main concern. “I like your style and find many things well expressed,” he began. “I would again like to encourage you to go ahead and finish the manuscript.” But, Weisskopf advised, Capra should wait before approaching a publisher until he had a complete manuscript in hand. He should also understand that few publishers offered advances for textbooks anymore. “I understand your need for financial support but I suppose you are aware of the fact that a book like this is not going to bring in much money because of the nature of the subject. The best that one can hope is something like $1 thousand the first year and less thereafter.” Writing a textbook, Weisskopf counseled, might be a noble endeavor, but it was a lousy get-rich-quick scheme.9
Just at that moment, Capra received his invitation to visit Berkeley and give some talks to Geoffrey Chew’s group. (Capra had sent some early essays comparing Chew’s core notion of particle physics—a self-consistent particle “bootstrap”—to central doctrines of Buddhist thought. Chew had passed these essays on to his graduate students Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, who in turn encouraged Chew to invite Capra to visit.) While back in California, Capra also checked in with his former postdoctoral advisor at Santa Cruz. They talked about Capra’s parallel projects: continuing his exploration of Eastern mystical thought, and pushing forward on his textbook project. The Santa Cruz physicist—“a rather hard-headed and pragmatic physicist” in Capra’s estimation, hardly one drawn to the woolly countercultural currents swirling around him—encouraged Capra to combine his interests and change gears with his book project. Rather than write a physics textbook, why not refocus the book to explore the parallels between physics and Eastern thought that had so intrigued Capra since his transcendental experience on the beach? Coming on the heels of Weisskopf’s realistic cautions about how well a textbook might sell, Capra took his former advisor’s advice. Upon his return to London, Capra began composing new chapters on Eastern mysticism—one each on Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Zen—and interleaving them with the textbook chapters he had already written.10
Capra found the new plan inspiring, and set about trying to interest publishers in the project. A dozen rejections later, a small London-based publishing house agreed to take a gamble on it, even offering Capra the long-sought, if modest, advance payment that allowed him to finish writing it up. Completed manuscript in hand, Capra next managed to interest a tiny American publisher to bring out an edition in the United States: Shambhala Press, then just five years old, which had been founded in Berkeley to publish books on Eastern mysticism and spirituality. The Tao of Physics thus appeared simultaneously in Britain and the United States in 1975.11
A few months later Capra met Weisskopf in person again, at a conference in California, and Capra presented to Weisskopf a copy of the book. Weisskopf read most of it on his plane flight back to Massachusetts and he “liked it very much,” he reported back. “It is very hard for me to judge whether you have succeeded in your task,” Weisskopf continued, “since it addresses itself to a very specific kind of public than you find here in the East.” Translation: we have no hippies at MIT. “I do believe, however, that it is a good book and that there will be many people who will have a better idea of physics after they have read it.” Weisskopf shared his concern that some readers might be “scared off by the ‘Tao’ side of the deliberation,” but conceded that “you can’t make it right for everybody.” He closed on a brighter note: “I wish you all luck and wonder how the sales will go.”12
They went well. The first edition from Shambhala—20,000 copies—sold out in just over a year. Bantam brought out a pocket-sized edition in 1977 as part of its New Age series, with an initial printing of 150,000 copies. By 1983 half a million copies were in print, with additional editions prepared in a host of foreign languages. Twenty-five years later the book had achieved true blockbuster status: forty-three editions, including twenty-three translations—everything from German, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian to Farsi, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—with millions of copies sold worldwide.13
Many factors seem to have combined to jolt the book into the sales stratosphere. For one thing, Capra enjoyed a firm command of the physics; he had been well trained. The fact that the physics-heavy portions of his book had begun as drafts for a textbook—and that those sections had benefited from careful readings by a towering physicist like Viki Weisskopf—surely helped Capra clarify just how he wanted to present difficult concepts such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or quantum nonlocality. Moreover, his incursions into Eastern thought, while sometimes belittled by specialists in religious studies, nonetheless sprang from a genuine earnestness.14 Capra had become a seeker, reading everything he could get his hands on. By the time he finished the book, he had spent years experimenting with alternate modes of encountering the world, always pushing to absorb the insights of the ancient mystical traditions. And then there was his impeccable timing. With the New Age rage in full force by the mid-1970s, conditions were ripe for a book like The Tao of Physics. Capra’s book capitalized on a tremendous, diffuse, untapped thirst, a widely shared striving to find some meaning in the universe that might transcend the mundane affairs of the here and now. The market for Capra’s book had been teeming like a huge pot of water just on the verge of boiling. The Tao of Physics became a catalyst, triggering an enormous reaction.
When Capra set out to promote the book, he seemed straight out of central casting. “Tall and slim with curly brown hair skirting the nape of his neck,” cooed one Washington Post reporter, “Capra, with California tan, shoulder bag, and a Yin Yang button pinned to his casual jacket, seems more a purveyor of some new self-awareness scheme than a physicist.” (Fig. 7.1.) It soon became clear, however, that Capra was more than just a pretty face. He was on a mission not just to explore the foundations of modern physics, but to alter the very fabric of Western civilization; “a cultural revolution in the true sense of the word,” as he put it in the book’s epilogue. As he saw it, modern physics had undergone a tremendous sea change in its understanding of reality, and yet most physicists—let alone the broader public—had failed to appreciate the consequences. The “mechanistic, fragmented world view” of classical physics had been toppled by quantum mechanics and relativity, but Western society still carried on as if Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and Bell had never lifted a pencil. “The world view implied by modern physics is inconsistent with our present society, which does not reflect the harmonious interrelatedness we observe in nature,” he explained. A proper understanding of what modern physics had achieved—especially its “philosophical, cultural, and spiritual implications”—could help restore the balance before it was too late.15
FIGURE 7.1. Fritjof Capra discussing The Tao of Physics in November 1977. (Photograph by Roger Ressmeyer, reproduced by permission of Corbis Images.)
The new worldview of modern physics was not just out of step with Western traditions, Capra concluded; it had rediscovered the age-old sutras of Buddhism, Vedas
of Hinduism, and I Ching of ancient Chinese thought. “The further we penetrate into the submicroscopic world, the more we shall realize how the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting, and ever-moving components with man being an integral part of this system.” Only in the twentieth century, in the wake of the great revolutions of modern physics, were physicists beginning to throw off the yoke of Cartesian dualism, the assumption that had reigned since the seventeenth century that mind and matter occupied separate realms, firmly cut off from each other. Capra acknowledged that much good work had followed upon postulates of René Descartes and Isaac Newton such as reductionism, the dictum to study nature by breaking things down into their smallest parts and focusing on the mechanisms by which parts interact to become wholes. But the centuries-long trend of Western science had not been without its costs. “Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world,” Capra contended, had long been understood in Eastern traditions as a mere “illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality.”16 Western observers’ impressions of the physical world as pointillist and fundamentally cleaved off from human consciousness arose not from the nature of reality per se, but from the mental filters and habits we happened to have imposed upon our investigations. Three centuries after Newton and Descartes, quantum physicists had only just learned that “we can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves”—a deep insight that Capra considered comparable to age-old Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist teachings.17
In the remainder of his book, Capra marched through a series of further parallels between the latest lessons of quantum physics and the venerable mantras of Eastern mysticism. First and foremost was what he saw as the “organicism” or holism implied by quantum interconnectedness: ultimately the quantum world is not divisible into separate parts, but is woven into one seamless whole. He drew on several of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s favorite physicists, among them Henry Stapp, David Bohm, and John Wheeler. Like group member Jack Sarfatti, Capra emphasized Wheeler’s shift from “observer” to “participator,” even including a long quotation from one of Wheeler’s little-noticed conference talks on the theme. “The idea of ‘participation instead of observation,’” Capra noted, “has been formulated in modern physics only recently, but it is an idea which is well known to any student of mysticism,” which, after all, has always required “full participation with one’s whole being.”18
Capra also saw deep parallels between the koans, or riddles, of Buddhist thought, the constant interplay of opposites in Taoism, and the paradoxes of quantum theory. Bohr’s complementarity called on physicists to transcend what appeared to be opposites: neither wave nor particle but both. Although “this notion of complementarity has become an essential part of the way physicists think about nature,” Capra explained, the physicists had come late to the party: “in fact, the notion of complementarity proved to be extremely useful 2,500 years ago,” when the Chinese sages promoted the dialectic of yin and yang to the center of their cosmos. Little wonder, Capra concluded, that Bohr adopted the yin-yang symbol for his family coat of arms. Einstein’s relativity, meanwhile, with its interconversion of matter and energy via E = mc2, echoed the Eastern emphasis upon dynamism and flow: the universe caught in a never-ending dance, rather than being a collection of static objects. The merging of space and time into a unified space-time likewise brought the physicists’ cosmic picture into line with long-standing Eastern intuitions.19
More than just the conclusions of physics and mysticism seemed to line up. Capra saw deep similarities in their methods—their Tao, or “way”—as well. He insisted that both sides were, at root, empirical. Physicists could formulate no lasting knowledge without careful observations and experiments. So, too, did close and careful observations form the backbone of mystical knowledge, observations or intuitions gleaned by the mystics during meditation or other altered states of consciousness. Mystics achieve this “direct insight,” Capra explained, by “watching rather than thinking.” The centrality of experience to all Eastern traditions thus gave them “a strong empirical character,” closely “parallel to the firm basis of scientific knowledge on experiment.” In both cases, knowledge rests on observations that transcend the ordinary world of appearances, pushing beyond our usual senses: to the impossibly small realm of atoms and particles, or to the inner space of altered consciousness.20
The Tao of Physics succeeded in that rare category, the crossover hit. It held broad appeal for hundreds of thousands of readers who were not physicists, or academics of any sort. Looking back a few years after its original publication, one reviewer marveled that Capra’s book had sold “amazingly well, not only to the usual Shambhala devotees of Eastern religion but also to engineers, Caltech grad students and people of the general population who, a few years later, would be reading Carl Sagan.” Reviewers routinely touted Capra’s clear expository style. “He has a pleasing way of raising and answering questions,” proclaimed one. “The book is very exciting, and Capra is clearly in earnest,” cheered another; “I do not know of a better general introduction to the major concepts of modern physics.” Another emphasized that Capra “writes fluently, quotes charming haikus and Zen koans”; his presentation never suffered from the “ponderous” and “abstract” style so often adopted in popular treatments of modern physics. More than just a good read, the book received a great deal of serious, scholarly attention. Academic journals specializing in philosophy, history, and sociology carried reviews. The journal Theoria to Theory published a lengthy review section on the book, with detailed comments from three specialists in philosophy and religious studies. Sociologists and philosophers of science likewise devoted substantial articles to the book, picking through the claimed parallels and subjecting each to sustained critique.21
Some scholars accepted the basic approach that Capra followed—comparing quotations from physicists and mystics to illustrate the parallels between them—but complained that Capra overlooked equally good parallels a good bit closer to home. Why focus only on Eastern mystics like Lao Tzu, some reviewers asked, while ignoring all the influential adherents of Western mystical traditions, from the pre-Socratics through the neo-Platonists? Surely pronouncements by ancient Greek philosophers like Parmenides or Anaximander about the nature of matter and the essence of change could stack up equally well with telltale quotations from quantum physicists. Where better than in Plato’s Timaeus, with its notion of a “womb of becoming,” could one find parallels to modern physicists’ description of the vacuum state? Immanuel Kant’s meticulous parsing of the worlds of appearance and existence, moreover, seemed just as robust an anticipation of quantum physicists’ emphasis upon the active role of the observer as the Hindu concept of “maya.”22
Others were less sanguine about the “parallelist” approach itself. What controls or provisions were in place to guard against cherry-picking juicy quotations out of context, with no justification of those quotations’ representativeness? How did analysts like Capra handle subtle nuances of translation? After all, both Sanskrit aphorisms and mathematical equations had to be rendered into a common language (in this case, English) before they could be compared. Quotations might not only be ripped out of context but also out of their original vocabularies, introducing all manner of distortions.23
Capra was also far too cavalier a “lumper” for many of these analytical “splitters.” Did it really make sense to dump Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and more into a single Eastern worldview? Several reviewers found that to be as dubious and unhelpful as papering over all the distinctions between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and proclaiming a unified Western worldview. Meanwhile, some reviewers were quick to point out that many of Capra’s favorite examples from modern physics were far from accepted as mainstream. Physicists still debated many of the points under consideration, eve
n as Capra tended to “muddle” together competing—even contradictory—interpretations into a single worldview of modern physics. The effect, some complained, produced a “schizophrenic” oscillation between “different, often conflicting, interpretations of physics.” Or, as another reviewer put it, Capra “dissolves the precise meaning of technical terms in order to establish analogies; and he plays down discrepancies between points of view when they threaten his parallels.” Same for Capra’s treatment of “empiricism”: are mystics’ intuitions, gleaned individually during altered states of consciousness, really comparable to physicists’ experiments, which, at least in principle, could be conducted in public and replicated by others?24
Finally, what was the actual point? Some accused Capra of circular reasoning: physics concepts were supposed to be bolstered by their resemblance to ancient wisdom; but Capra used the template of ideas from modern physics to pick out and accentuate particular ideas from the mystics. So which was giving credence to which? Capra likewise seemed to flip-flop between the argument that the two traditions yielded separate but complementary visions of reality, and the suggestion that one tradition confirmed or validated the other. What, meanwhile, might account for the similarities that did exist? As one philosopher pointed out, the mere fact that two people said things that sounded alike in no way meant that what they said was true. In the end might the similarities, striking as they may seem when stacked up, one after the other, in Capra’s charming and instructive book, tell us only about “basic tendencies of the human mind, or perhaps similarities in metaphor,” rather than how the world really works? The similarities could have an even more mundane explanation, suggested a skeptical sociologist: “contamination” over time, since, by the twentieth century, both physicists and mystics had heard a lot about each other. Perhaps there had been conscious or unconscious borrowings of terms. Some of these borrowings were clearly intended to be ironic or humorous, as in physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s “eightfold way” of symmetries among nuclear particles, echoing the famous Buddhist path to nirvana. Those types of parallels, critics maintained, reflected at most a matter of semantics but nothing of substance.25