In the end, all of the learned rebukes, steeped as they were in philosophy, theology, and sociology, served to reinforce a most remarkable point: Capra’s little paperback had clearly hit a nerve. No other popularizations received such serious and sustained scrutiny—scrutiny that continued to fill academic journals fully fifteen years after The Tao of Physics had first appeared in print.
Perhaps the most surprising response of all, however, came from scientists. Some certainly responded as we might expect, downplaying the book as mere popularization and dismissing the countercultural overtones as just so much Zeitgeist pap. Famed biochemist and science writer Isaac Asimov, for one, bewailed the “genuflections” to all things Eastern made by “rational minds who have lost their nerve.” Jeremy Bernstein, Harvard-trained physicist and staff writer for The New Yorker, went further. He concluded his review of Capra’s book, “I agree with Capra when he writes, ‘Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science but man needs both.’ What no one needs, in my opinion, is this superficial and profoundly misleading book.”26
These predictable responses, however, were by no means the norm. Mysticism aside, Capra offered a vision around which many physicists could rally. In his opening chapter he had noted the “widespread dissatisfaction” and “marked anti-scientific attitude” of so many people in the West, especially among the youth: “They tend to see science, and physics in particular, as an unimaginative, narrow-minded discipline which is responsible for all the evils of modern technology.” Capra declared, “This book aims at improving the image of science”; the insights and joys of modern physics extended far beyond mere technology. Indeed, “physics can be a path with a heart, a way to spiritual knowledge and self-realization.” Few reviewers missed the point. Physics Today ran a review of the book by a Cornell astrophysicist. The review began by citing the profession’s litany of woes: the “anti-scientific sentiment” of the age, which distressed Capra and his critics alike, “manifests itself on all levels of our society, from a decrease in funding for basic research to a turning to Eastern mysticism and various forms of occultism.” Not an auspicious start for the volume under consideration. Yet the reviewer judged Capra’s book to be a great success. For one thing, the book got the physics right. (On this point, reviewers had far fewer complaints than with Gary Zukav’s otherwise-similar Dancing Wu Li Masters. Unlike the highly trained Capra, Zukav had no previous background in physics.) Even more important: The Tao of Physics integrated “the abstract, rational world view of science with the immediate, feeling-oriented vision of the mystic so attractive to many of our best students.”27
The reviewer’s comments proved more than a passing observation. Just as the review was going to press, Capra was busy teaching a new undergraduate course at Berkeley based on his book. He reported proudly to MIT’s Victor Weisskopf that one-third of the students were science majors, eager to learn about the foundations of modern physics: just the sort of philosophical material they were not receiving in their other physics classes. Soon the American Journal of Physics, devoted to pedagogical innovations in the teaching of physics, began carrying articles on how best—not whether—to use The Tao of Physics in the classroom. One early adopter began by citing the huge market success of Capra’s book. “This leads naturally to the question,” he continued, “how can a physicist utilize this interest by offering a course using Capra’s book?” A follow-up article commented matter-of-factly:
Anyone involved in physics education is likely to be asked to comment on parallelism [between modern physics and Eastern mysticism] at some stage. It would be easy to dismiss such ideas entirely, and in so doing possibly risk alienating a new-found interest among students. This field has the potential of appealing to the imagination and should perhaps be carefully explored and maybe even “exploited.”
With budgets falling and enrollments crashing, physicists could ill afford to turn their noses up at anything that might bring students back into their classrooms.28
An early article in the American Journal of Physics illustrated one way forward. It described a successful course (“Zen of Physics”) that David Harrison, a physics professor at the University of Toronto, had offered two years in a row. Like Capra, Harrison had already been intrigued by parallels between quantum physics and other intellectual traditions, ranging from the ancient Greeks to Eastern religions. He was also plugged into the New Age community in and around Toronto. He conceived the course, he later recalled, as one way to bring these many facets of his life together. The new course felt like a liberation. For one thing, the intimate classroom setting allowed for in-depth discussion. Essays and “special individual projects” replaced problem sets and (he argued) fostered greater enlightenment and enthusiasm among the students—so much so that Harrison answered popular demand by offering a more advanced follow-up course, playfully dubbed “Son of Zen of Physics.” Within a few years, the original course had become so popular that he had to break it up into smaller tutorials (capped at twenty-five students each) to accommodate the expanding enrollments while retaining the discussion-based approach. He developed novel assignments as well, such as this one:
In 1969 [Lawrence] LeShan devised an interesting test. He collected 62 quotations, some from modern theoretical physicists and some from mystics. Below, we have randomly selected 20 of these quotations…. Beside each statement clearly mark a P if you believe it was made by a physicist and an M if you believe it was made by a mystic.
Examples: “It is the mind which gives to things their quality, their foundation, and their being”; or “Thus the material world constitutes the whole world of appearance, but not the whole world of reality; we may think of it as forming only a cross section of the world of reality.”29
To Harrison’s delight, he soon found his course filling up with physics majors alongside nonscience students, just as Capra had found in his course at Berkeley. A few years later he published another article in the American Journal of Physics detailing one of the lesson plans he had developed for the course, on Bell’s theorem and quantum nonlocality. He noted that standard physics curricula and textbooks still had not incorporated Bell’s theorem. (Indeed they hadn’t: the first graduate-level textbook to discuss Bell’s theorem appeared in 1985; the topic didn’t appear in undergraduate textbooks until even later.) Consequently, he had to seek extra help to make sense of the material for himself. “Tuned-in” friends in his local countercultural circles told him about the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and he launched into a long and spirited correspondence with group member Nick Herbert, whom he thanked extensively for explaining Bell’s theorem to him in detail. Only through his Tao-inspired course, in turn, did physics students learn about such major, foundational topics. Supplemental materials like his latest article filled a real curricular hole.30
By no means did courses like “Zen of Physics” swamp ordinary physics department offerings. All the same, the courses, and Capra’s book, clearly left their mark. As late as 1990, two scholars noted that university physics courses throughout the United States still routinely listed The Tao of Physics on their syllabi as a “helpful reference.”31 The book’s presence in the classroom became so common that some physics teachers began to push back. They criticized what seemed to be loose analogies or parallels between physics and mysticism, which they feared were as likely to confound students as enlighten them. Whether or not Capra’s parallels could stand on their own, did they really hold special pedagogical value? After all, to truly understand mysticism required the same kind of discipline, training, and time that understanding modern physics did; why becloud one difficult subject with allusions to another? Debates broke out in the pages of the American Journal of Physics. At one point Harrison, the “Zen of physics” professor, shot back: “It should also be emphasized that most of these students would not have taken an offering by the Physics Department if it were not this one.” Or, as he put it more recently, he was among the best in his department at delivering “bums
in the seats.”32
In a roundabout way, Capra thus fulfilled his original goal: he wrote a successful textbook after all. Physicists across the continent eagerly snatched up The Tao of Physics. In their classrooms, the book helped demonstrate to disaffected students—or so physicists hoped—that they, too, were “with it.” Along the way, the book inspired some of the first lesson plans on topics like Bell’s theorem. Capra’s book thus smuggled some attention to interpretive, foundational issues back into the classroom.33
Chapter 8
Fringe?!
At the time of the first conference, it was agreed that there would be no publicity for the conferences from Est. Est has adhered strictly to this agreement. Although they are not publicized by Est, the conferences are not secret; they are widely known within the physics community.
—Sidney Coleman, 1981
The Fundamental Fysiks Group’s dogged efforts to meld quantum entanglement with parapsychology and Eastern mysticism set the group’s members apart from the physics mainstream, but their self-made universe was not closed unto itself. Despite the intuitions (or even hopes) of scientists and philosophers, no clear demarcation separated the Fundamental Fysiks Group from “real” physics. In fact, highly successful physicists often sought to cross paths, figuratively and literally, with members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group.
When pressed to give an opinion on possible connections between parapsychology and his own work on quantum entanglement, John Bell refused to dismiss the matter out of hand. In a charming letter to a longtime parapsychology researcher, Bell wrote that his experiences as a young physics student tempered his judgment of psi research. Critics of parapsychology often complained about the small number of times that researchers had successfully repeated a claimed psi effect. But perhaps that was not too different from Bell’s own frustrations in his student laboratory in Northern Ireland, he wrote, where he had failed miserably to reproduce the well-known laws of electric attraction and repulsion. He had “formed the opinion that electrostatics could never have been convincingly discovered in my home country—because of the damp.” Perhaps a similar confounding factor masked exotic parapsychological phenomena as well, making them difficult to reproduce at will. In any case, Bell closed, good scientists should certainly keep an open mind: physicists had been surprised by seemingly impossible phenomena several times before.1
Yale’s eminent physicist Henry Margenau reasoned along similar lines. Like Bell, Margenau was no stranger to the mysteries of quantum theory. He had published one of the earliest responses to Einstein’s famous paper with Podolsky and Rosen on “spooky actions at a distance” in quantum theory, all the way back in 1936. He had gone on to write successful physics textbooks and treatises on the philosophy of science.2 Margenau also launched the journal Foundations of Physics, in which several members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group published their work. In the midst of his long and distinguished career, Margenau delivered a keynote address to the American Society for Psychical Research. He likened the current state of psi research to the early days of radioactivity, when a few stubborn signals—clicks in Geiger counters—could neither be easily reproduced nor convincingly explained.3 In 1978 Margenau teamed up with psychologist Lawrence LeShan, just a few years after LeShan published his book The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist. Together they wrote a short submission to the top-flight journal Science urging the scientific study of extrasensory perception (ESP).4
Like members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, Margenau highlighted quantum entanglement as a likely means of reconciling ESP with action at a distance. As he and LeShan wrote in their piece for Science, “ESP is not stranger than some of the discussions” that had recently emerged in quantum theory, such as Bell’s theorem. Marching through one example after another, they found no contradiction between well-tested scientific laws and ESP. “We can find contradictions between ESP and our culturally accepted view of reality, but not—as many of us have believed—between ESP and the scientific laws that have been so laboriously developed.” In the absence of those contradictions, they suggested, “it may be advisable to look more carefully at reports of these strange and uncomfortable phenomena which come to us from trained scientists and fulfill the basic rules of scientific research.”5 What happened next left Margenau fuming. Not only did Science fail to publish Margenau and LeShan’s letter to the editor but the editors also neglected even to acknowledge receipt of the submission. Nine months later Margenau sent a sharp letter complaining about the conspicuous lack of response. “Is this your policy in dealing with matters of this sort?”6 A month later Margenau was still outraged by “these violations of every canon of editorial courtesy.” Their letter about ESP never did appear in print.7
Other leading lights interacted directly with members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group on topics of shared interest. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, John Wheeler’s longtime colleague at Princeton, had introduced the notion that human consciousness might be necessary to collapse a quantum wavefunction, reducing its plethora of possibilities to one actual outcome. Wigner’s idea had provided early inspiration to members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, as they groped toward a physical account of parapsychological effects. Wigner, in turn, commented generously—in public and in print—on Elizabeth Rauscher’s working explanation for the remote-viewing results that Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ had recorded in their psi lab at the Stanford Research Institute. Wigner concurred with Rauscher that Bell’s theorem seemed relevant, and encouraged her work on multidimensional space-times and psi phenomena.8
Wigner’s former student Abner Shimony dabbled with similar material. One year before he teamed up with his friend and collaborator John Clauser to write a definitive review article on Bell’s theorem and its experimental tests, Shimony published a rather different article in Margenau’s journal, Foundations of Physics. Together with three of his graduate students, Shimony put Wigner’s idea about consciousness and quantum theory to the test. Recall that, to Wigner, an electron being put through its paces between the poles of two magnets would only assume a definite value for its spin—either spin up or spin down—once a human observer had bothered to look at the array of detectors. The act of trying to observe the electron’s spin, in Wigner’s view, forced the electron to assume only one of its two possible outcomes. If Wigner’s idea were correct, Shimony reasoned, then one should be able to reproduce telepathy in the laboratory. Shimony sat one participant in a closed room next to a source of radioactive atoms and a sensitive detector, while a second participant sat in a different room. Following Wigner’s chain of argument, the first participant should have been able to send messages to the second simply by choosing whether to look at the display monitor attached to the radioactivity detector, since (to Wigner) the act of observing the monitor should have constituted the fundamental quantum act of collapsing their conjoined wavefunction. (In its essentials, Shimony’s experiment was not so different from the metaphase typewriter dreamed up by Nick Herbert—minus the LSD and free-for-all party atmosphere in which Herbert and company had sought to use their device to contact the spirit of Harry Houdini.) Suffice it to say, Shimony and his students found no statistically significant results; but they found the topic important enough to warrant publication. Years later, Shimony—an acknowledged leader in the interpretation of quantum theory—reprinted his telepathy null-result article in a volume of his most significant papers.9
Gerald Feinberg also lent a hand. An accomplished theoretical physicist in his own right—he studied under a Nobel laureate for his dissertation, and his early prediction of a new type of particle earned three other colleagues their own Nobel prizes when they confirmed its existence—he constantly rubbed shoulders with Nobelists in Columbia’s physics department. In 1967 he published a well-known article in the Physical Review on particles that might travel faster than light, coining the term “tachyon” in the process.10 (The article focused on whether such theoretical beasts might be self-consistent withi
n the frameworks of relativity and quantum mechanics; it did not broach potential parapsychological consequences.) A dedicated futurologist, Feinberg penned The Prometheus Project: Mankind’s Search for Long-Range Goals in 1969, landing him squarely within a network of futurists that also included Ira Einhorn.11 Perhaps because of these interests, Uri Geller’s handlers brought the young Israeli performer to Feinberg at Columbia during Geller’s first trip to the United States in autumn 1971, before transferring Geller to Puthoff and Targ’s psi lab for in-depth studies.12 Young physicists like Elizabeth Rauscher, inspired by Feinberg’s work on tachyons, sought him out for advice on their own investigations. Feinberg obliged—he and Rauscher spoke often and at length about her work for the better part of a decade—and he went further, contributing his own paper to a conference on quantum theory and parapsychology. Not long after that, he served as Columbia’s physics department chair, becoming the boss of all those Nobel laureates.13
How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival Page 20
