How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival
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David Bohm, whose early model of hidden variables in quantum theory had inspired John Bell to investigate quantum entanglement and nonlocality in the first place, likewise enjoyed close relations with members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. In addition to conducting his own tests of Uri Geller, Bohm hosted Rauscher, Fred Alan Wolf, and Jack Sarfatti at his home department in London at various times during the 1970s. He shared his emerging ideas about quantum theory and the “implicate order”—worked out as much in conversation with New Age thinkers like Jiddu Krishnamurti as with fellow physicists—with the Fundamental Fysiks Group during a visit in 1978.14
The French theoretical physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard also made several visits to the Fundamental Fysiks Group. By the time he visited the Berkeley group and checked in with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at their Stanford Research Institute psi lab in 1975, Costa de Beauregard had published a well-received textbook on quantum mechanics and become a sought-after speaker in physics departments throughout Europe and North America. He also served as director of research for the theoretical physics division of France’s prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).15 He often dropped hints in his mainstream physics articles of possible links between Bell’s theorem, telepathy, and clairvoyance; he made the connections more explicit in his other writings.16 He joined the Fondation Odier de Psycho-Physique, France’s version of the American and British Societies for Psychical Research. As he explained to a journalist in 1981, his physics research dovetailed with his Roman Catholic faith: each had inspired him to become a spiritualist, believing strongly in the notion of mind over matter.17
Richard Mattuck showed similar facility with the new material. By the early 1970s, the MIT-trained theorist had published more than twenty major articles on condensed-matter physics in leading journals, using quantum theory to describe bulk properties of materials. Complementing his research articles, he had published a much-beloved textbook, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem, in 1967. And then, for eight years, his name stopped appearing in the mainstream physics journals.18 By the time the second edition of his textbook appeared, in 1976, Mattuck had turned his attention squarely to the quantum mechanics of psi. He built upon Evan Harris Walker’s model of consciousness as a collection of hidden variables, which Nick Herbert and Saul-Paul Sirag had followed closely from their perch in Arthur Young’s Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley. Mattuck drew on many of the calculational tricks he had mastered in his many-body work, summing over the combined effects of many tiny, piecemeal quantum processes, to demonstrate that larger psychokinetic effects would result if consciousness sent out pulses of information, rather than proceeding (as in Walker’s original model) via continuous information processing. The summed pulses, Mattuck continued, could account for psi phenomena of the magnitude reported in several laboratory studies, including one of his own. He published several iterations of this work in parapsychology journals and spoke on the same psi lecture circuit as Rauscher, Puthoff, Targ, and Costa de Beauregard. Once he began publishing “regular” physics papers again, they were entirely on hidden variables, Bell’s theorem, and the foundations of quantum mechanics—topics he had never broached before his work on psi.19
Then there is Brian Josephson. While a graduate student at the University of Cambridge in the early 1960s, Josephson published a short paper on electrical currents that might tunnel between a thin slice of ordinary metal sandwiched between two superconductors. Experimentalists observed the predicted effect within months, and the “Josephson junction” earned Josephson a Nobel Prize in 1973, at the tender age of thirty-three.20 Today such supersensitive junctions are hardwired into everything from quantum computer prototypes to instruments that measure neural activity inside the human brain. By the time Josephson accepted his prize in Stockholm, however, his research interests had turned squarely to Eastern mysticism, the nature of consciousness, and parapsychology. He traveled to San Francisco late in 1976 to check out Puthoff and Targ’s psi lab and to deliver a talk for the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Sarfatti’s Physics/Consciousness Research Group under-wrote the expenses for Josephson’s two-week trip. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle covered Josephson’s visit, describing how the young Nobelist “padded around” Sarfatti’s Nob Hill apartment “in maroon sox,” while the two compared notes on their evolving theories of quantum entanglement and psi. Josephson continued to speak at conferences on parapsychology alongside Puthoff and Targ, Rauscher, and others, even providing the keynote address for the fabled 1977 conference in Reykjavík, at which Ira Einhorn had mysteriously failed to show.21 (Fig. 8.1.) When the New York Review of Books ran a feature article in 1979 that was critical of efforts to use quantum theory to explain psi phenomena, Josephson teamed up with Costa de Beauregard, Mattuck, and Walker to write a feisty reply.22 Josephson’s passion for the topic has not wavered to this day. He directs a “mind-matter unification” project at Cambridge and vigorously defends parapsychology from naysayers.23
FIGURE 8.1. Elizabeth Rauscher and Brian Josephson at a conference on quantum mechanics and consciousness, held in Spain in the late 1970s. (Courtesy Elizabeth Rauscher.)
Perhaps the apotheosis of such interminglings—of people and topics that one might have assumed would remain as cleanly separated as oil and water—occurred at a conference in 1986 in honor of Eugene Wigner’s ninetieth birthday. Nick Herbert’s former roommate from graduate school, Heinz Pagels, helped to organize the meeting under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences. (Pagels served as the Academy’s executive director.) Olivier Costa de Beauregard also served on the organizing committee. The large meeting, featuring more than fifty invited lectures and twenty poster presentations over four days, was held in New York City’s World Trade Center. The conference served as something of a “coming out” party for those researchers who had toiled for years on the foundations of quantum mechanics while most working physicists balked at the topic. In fact, the organizers encouraged those whom they contacted to spread the word to other people who might be interested, since the community was still so diffuse.24
To the organizers’ delight, the meeting drew several top-notch contributors. In addition to Wigner, three other Nobel laureates or soon-to-be laureates participated, as did heavyweights like John Wheeler. (John Bell contributed a paper, though he was not able to attend in person.) Several core members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group shared the podium with these leading figures. Henry Stapp and John Clauser were each invited to attend, and Nick Herbert contributed a poster presentation.25 Jack Sarfatti and Fred Alan Wolf were there, too; Sarfatti even caught the ear of a New York Times reporter who was covering the conference and made a plug for his idiosyncratic interpretation of Bell’s theorem.26 As one of the plenary sessions was wrapping up, Nick Herbert heard someone calling his name. He looked up and was greeted by Andrija Puharich—Uri Geller’s original promoter, and sometime collaborator with Ira Einhorn on paranormal topics. Puharich had come into the city for the conference from his residence-cum-psi-lab in nearby Ossining, New York. Mingling among all those physicists, Puharich appeared decked out in opera cape and cane, accented by a “beautiful blonde babe” hanging on each arm.27 Such was the clientele at conferences on Bell’s theorem and the interpretation of quantum theory.
One conspicuous feature of the New York Academy of Sciences conference in 1986 was its heavy emphasis on new experiments. Among the most significant, lauded even to this day, was a variant of Clauser’s experiment, performed by the French physicist Alain Aspect. Physicists routinely look back and date the upsurge of interest in Bell’s theorem and the foundations of quantum mechanics to Aspect’s elegant experiment, the results of which appeared in 1982.28
John Clauser and his Berkeley student published the results of their first test of Bell’s theorem in 1972. Not long after that, Clauser began to correspond with a French experimental physicist working at the Institut d’Optique in Orsay, just outside Pari
s. The French physicist was interested in conducting his own version of Clauser’s test, and sought Clauser’s advice for how best to proceed.29 A few years later, after Clauser had left the Berkeley laboratory, one of his former postdoctoral advisors shipped several boxes of equipment to the Orsay group, including the sensitive calcite polarizers that had been at the heart of Clauser’s jerry-built apparatus.30 In the meantime, the French experimentalist had been tutored in the niceties of Bell’s theorem by Olivier Costa de Beauregard and Bernard d’Espagnat, France’s leading experts in the topic.31
While Costa de Beauregard and d’Espagnat coached their French colleague, the physicist who would eventually take the lead on the new experiment set off on a separate adventure. After earning his master’s degree, Alain Aspect embarked for Cameroon, the small African nation and former French colony. He spent three years there working on various aid projects, the French equivalent of an American Peace Corps mission. To relax in the evenings, he pored over a recent textbook on quantum mechanics by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, already a major figure in French physics who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize. Inspired by the textbook, Aspect’s mind wandered over the classic conundrums of quantum theory. Upon Aspect’s return to Paris in 1974, his advisor—the French physicist who had been coached by Clauser, Costa de Beauregard, and d’Espagnat—handed him a stack of papers. On the very top sat Bell’s original article on quantum entanglement. And so Aspect dove into the topic for his doctoral research.32
In Clauser’s original experiment at Berkeley, he and his student had set the angles of polarizers at the two detectors before each round of photons was released. A determined advocate of hidden variables could therefore object that information about the settings at one detector could somehow be communicated to the other detector long before the photons had been emitted. One could imagine that measurements on the pairs of photons could arrange themselves into the startling Bell-like correlations by some as-yet unknown local, causal process. Clauser had recognized the point from his earliest musings on Bell’s theorem. In fact, Clauser had mentioned in his first letter to Bell, back in 1969—the very first indication of interest in Bell’s work that Bell had received from anyone, anywhere—that one might try to vary the angles of the polarizers at random, while the photons were in flight.33 Such a feat would realize in practice the basic idea behind John Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment. With helpful guidance from Costa de Beauregard and d’Espagnat, that was what Aspect set out to do.34
Before launching into the new experiment, Aspect made a pilgrimage to CERN in Geneva to ask John Bell himself whether such an elaborate experiment would be worthwhile. Bell’s immediate response: “Have you a permanent position?” Such was the stigma still attached to the topic. After Aspect assured Bell about his job security—he had obtained a stable teaching position that allowed him to pursue his doctoral work—he and Bell began their discussion in earnest.35 Aspect’s work was further buoyed when d’Espagnat invited him to participate in the summer workshop on Bell’s theorem, held in 1976, which d’Espagnat was organizing. The workshop opened more doors; soon one of the participants introduced Aspect to Cohen-Tannoudji, whose textbook had sparked Aspect’s interest in foundations of quantum theory during his African sojourn. “That really made a big difference,” Aspect recalled recently: only upon seeing Cohen-Tannoudji make frequent visits to Aspect’s laboratory did the local physicists show Aspect some grudging respect. Until that time, Aspect says, “most physicists thought I was a crackpot” for wasting so much effort on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.36
Aspect’s ingenious twist on Clauser’s experiment was to use super-fast switches to change the path of a given photon en route from source to detector. Like the switches on a railroad track, Aspect’s acoustico-optical switches steered incoming photons toward different destinations. Depending on which orientation the switch happened to be in when a photon arrived, the photon would be directed toward one of two polarizers, set to different angles. The switches changed at lightning speed—about 100 million times per second—so that the orientations of the switches flip-flopped two or three times while the photons were in flight. Now there was no way that a signal traveling at light speed could inform one detector about the settings at the other detector before each side had completed its measurement.37
Aspect began making presentations on his planned experiment years before he had collected any data, and thus anticipation began to grow among small circles of self-selected enthusiasts.38 Elizabeth Rauscher visited Aspect and received a tour of his laboratory late in 1977, on the heels of her presentation to David Bohm’s group in London. Through an intermediary, Jack Sarfatti also got in touch with Aspect before the experiment was complete.39 D’Espagnat likewise became an effective spokesperson. He published a lengthy feature article on Bell’s theorem in Scientific American in 1979, in which he highlighted Aspect’s developing work. D’Espagnat also gave a sneak preview of Aspect’s results at the Esalen workshop in February 1982, more than half a year before Aspect submitted his article to the journal.40 Meanwhile, Aspect reached out directly to John Clauser. Clauser sent detailed comments on an early draft of one of Aspect’s articles, and Aspect thanked Clauser for “the tremendous work you have done for editing my paper,” clarifying details of the physics as well as smoothing over infelicities of English, which was not Aspect’s native language. Aspect also thanked Clauser for his “comments at P.R.L. [Physical Review Letters].” It seems that Clauser served as a not-so-blind referee of Aspect’s paper as well as its behind-the-scenes editor.41
At last Aspect’s article appeared in Physical Review Letters late in 1982, a decade after Clauser’s original experiment had been reported there. Having sent nearly a trillion pairs of photons through his elaborate apparatus, hyperfast switches and all, Aspect found the quantum-mechanical prediction fulfilled to unprecedented accuracy. Aspect had produced the “spooky action at a distance” in his laboratory, demonstrating Bell-styled nonlocality beyond a reasonable doubt. In Aspect’s experiment, the hypothesis that the photon pairs were not subject to quantum entanglement failed by five standard deviations. In the light of those data, Einstein’s (and Bell’s) hoped-for notion that the measurement of one photon would have no discernible effect on the second photon slipped to less than a one-in-a-million chance. To those (still in the minority) who were paying attention, Aspect’s experiment seemed to seal the deal: the quantum world is inherently nonlocal, after all.42
Not long after Aspect’s article came out, he spent the summer at an IBM research laboratory near San Francisco. He and Clauser enjoyed sailing together—still one of Clauser’s favorite pastimes—while Jack Sarfatti peppered the French physicist with questions about the experiment and haggled over details of their competing interpretations. Aspect also followed (with a hefty dose of skepticism) Nick Herbert’s efforts to use an experimental arrangement similar to the one in Orsay to send signals faster than light.43 Right from the start, Alain Aspect and his justly renowned experiment traveled in overlapping circles with core members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group.
Patronage ties also kept members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group entangled with mainstream physicists. By 1975 Werner Erhard had hired Robert W. Fuller to lead the est foundation, the philanthropic wing of his fast-growing enterprise. With Fuller’s help, Erhard’s circle of physicist-interlocutors widened considerably.
Fuller had completed his PhD in physics at Princeton under John Wheeler in the early 1960s before joining the physics faculty at Columbia University. He worked on nuclear physics and gravitation, and coauthored a textbook on mathematical methods for quantum physics based on one of his courses. But as the Vietnam War dragged on, Fuller found himself drifting from physics toward issues of social justice. Following short stints at various research centers, in 1970 he became president of his alma mater, Oberlin College, a prestigious liberal-arts college in Ohio. He was all of thirty-three years old. The experience was intense: sixteen-hour days, seven day
s a week. Fuller initiated major reforms, including steep increases in the recruitment of minorities among students and faculty, but burned out quickly. He left Oberlin after four years.44
While exploring options for what to do next, Fuller made a trip to San Francisco in 1974 and underwent Erhard’s est training, mostly, he recalls now, to see what all the fuss was about. When Erhard got wind that a former college president was taking the est course, he sought Fuller out. Erhard made the pitch: how would Fuller like to take over the est foundation and give away a quarter of a million dollars to worthy causes each year? Fuller agreed on one condition: that Erhard abolish the foundation’s board, so that only Fuller and Erhard would make decisions regarding the foundation’s charitable activities. Erhard agreed. After writing a brief, positive account of the est phenomenon, Fuller accepted Erhard’s invitation and become director of the est foundation in 1975.45
Soon after Fuller came on board, Erhard’s physics consultants, Jack Sarfatti and Saul-Paul Sirag, met the Esalen Institute’s Michael Murphy; that connection, in turn, led to the “Physics month” workshop at Esalen in January 1976. Yet Erhard yearned to make an even deeper impact on physics. Fuller told Erhard about Ernest Solvay, the Belgian industrialist and philanthropist who had sponsored a series of elite conferences in the 1910s and 1920s. Though hardly a household name, the Solvay conferences had long been renowned among physicists. Giants of the field like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues had gathered regularly, on Solvay’s tab, to puzzle through the mysteries of quantum physics. Solvay played host to some of the most weighty debates that marked the birth pangs of quantum mechanics. Like Erhard, Solvay had lacked a university education, and yet his steadfast financial support had goaded the world’s greatest physicists into some of their most important breakthroughs. Erhard listened to Fuller’s tales of the legendary conferences and dreamed of becoming the next Ernest Solvay.46