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

by Kaiser, David

  Despite Fuller’s departure and Sarfatti’s antics, the est-backed physics conferences developed into a robust annual tradition. The second meeting, held in January 1978 on quantum gravity, attracted such luminaries as Stephen Hawking.78 (Fig. 8.3.) Three years later Hawking returned for another est foundation conference, at which the earliest battles flared between himself and fellow physicist Leonard Susskind over whether quantum mechanics implied that information could leak out of black holes. Their intense but good-humored debate raged for another two decades before Hawking conceded defeat, acknowledging that information might indeed escape a black hole’s cosmic tug.79 The 1979 meeting on phase transitions, focusing on how quantum theory can describe the shifting boundary between order and disorder at the atomic scale, such as ice melting to water, likewise spurred important results. Participants at the meeting thanked Erhard and the est foundation for facilitating inspiring discussions in an article published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.80 And so it went: every year for a decade, the est foundation’s physics conferences attracted star after star of the physics firmament.

  FIGURE 8.3. Participants at the second annual est foundation conference on theoretical physics, January 1978. Stephen Hawking sits in the middle of the front row; John Wheeler stands just behind Hawking’s left shoulder. (Courtesy Roman Jackiw.)

  Despite the successful series, not everyone was happy with the field’s latest patron. One or two of Coleman’s and Jackiw’s colleagues had turned down their original invitation back in 1976, none too eager to become associated with Erhard or his California concoction.81 The organizers took the early objections in stride. Coleman even joked about the situation. When planning the fourth annual conference, for example, Coleman addressed his planning memos to Jackiw as “Eminence Grise” and Erhard as “Controversial Public Figure.”82 More serious trouble hit a few years later, during the January 1981 meeting. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle heard rumors about the upcoming conference, but was frustrated in his efforts to receive a straight answer as to why the world’s top physicists were gathering at Werner Erhard’s Franklin House residence. An est spokesperson didn’t help matters when he told the journalist that the meeting “is not secretive, but we don’t want to say anything about it.” That kind of evasion was just what a reporter in the post–Watergate era needed to hear; the Chronicle heralded the story about the “mysterious conference” on its front page.83 This brand of press attention was more difficult for Coleman to laugh off. He made copies of the Chronicle article and circulated a memo to Erhard, Jackiw, and the chairs of previous meetings:

  As nearly as I can determine, this is what happened: There is a physicist manqué and member of the Bay Area physics fringe who views the Franklin House conferences as diabolical; he sent me a letter a few years ago in which he numerologically identified Werner Erhard with both Adolph Hitler and the Beast of Revelations. (This misspelling of Adolf was necessary to make the numerology work.) This person gave a description of the fifth [est foundation] conference from his viewpoint to Charles Petit of the Chronicle. When Mr. Petit attempted to determine the facts of the matter, the Est functionaries whom he contacted felt themselves constrained by Est’s agreement not to publicize the conference. I believe that if they had not felt this way, there would have been no story; “Philanthropic Foundation Sponsors Scholarly Meetings” is no competition for Jean Harris’s murder trial on the front page of the Chronicle.84

  The “physicist manqué” whom Coleman mentioned was almost certainly Jack Sarfatti; soon after Coleman sent off his memo the Chronicle reported that Sarfatti—“another eccentric genius in North Beach”—was still busy printing up his “jeremiads” against Erhard and est.85 Taking no chances, Coleman typed up a “fact sheet” to be distributed to future conference invitees, emphasizing that neither Erhard nor any est personnel participated in sessions or played any substantive role in the conferences’ intellectual content. Even so, Coleman acknowledged after the Chronicle incident that “there exists a subset of the physics community that is opposed to Est-sponsored conferences in principle.”86

  Coleman and colleagues enjoyed a reprieve the following year. “Nobody refused an invitation because est was a sinister force,” Coleman noted, and “we were not beseiged by hordes of cranks or journalists.”87 But the calm was not to last. During preparations for the 1984 meeting, one of the invited participants raised a public objection. “My sole reason for declining your invitation,” physicist Michael Turner explained, “is the sponsorship of the meeting by the est Foundation…. It is my belief,” he continued, “that est sponsors these meetings primarily for the purpose of gaining prestige and legitimacy.”88 As Sarfatti had done years earlier, Turner circulated an open letter to all invited participants, urging them to “think carefully about attending a meeting sponsored by the est Foundation.”89 Unlike the year that Sarfatti raised a ruckus, the latest letter came from a rising star of the field who had just been promoted to codirector of the country’s first center for particle astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. The objection touched a nerve. Two weeks later, Jackiw reported to Erhard that “the pesky and persistent anti-est allergy” required some attention, since 20 percent of the people whom that year’s organizer had invited declined to be involved.90 Similar problems crept up when planning a later meeting. Coleman advised against holding an est workshop on string theory—just then capturing widespread attention as physicists’ best hope for unifying gravity with quantum theory—because the leading figure in the field, Ed Witten, refused to participate in an est-funded conference.91

  If the unusual source of patronage rubbed some physicists the wrong way, so too did the curious behavior of the est staff and volunteers who helped with local arrangements. Each year Erhard dispatched a number of est faithful to help run the meeting, doing everything from chauffeuring physicists around town to waiting on them at meals. By all accounts, the est volunteers were attentive, even doting: if there were a chance of rain they were prepared with extra umbrellas. The extreme hospitality was a welcome change for most of the academics, who were still suffering through lean times. But the est volunteers seemed to act strangely, in some physicists’ reckoning, performing their tasks with great courtesy but subdued affect. Their behavior became so awkward that one of the organizers had to intercede directly with Erhard during the 1984 meeting.92 (A clinical psychologist who underwent the est training in Manhattan wrote of the “zombielike faces of the est volunteers who staffed the training room,” with their “catatonic stares and rigid posturings.”)93 “The Menace of the Zombie Sycophants is real,” Coleman conceded in one of his annual memos. “Many participants feel they are being coddled by individuals whose motives are mysterious, and they find this disturbing.” Coleman added a footnote: “On the other hand, some of us can’t get enough of it.”94

  During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Erhard’s generous funding helped to fill the vacuum still gaping from the collapse of the physicists’ Cold War bubble. Securing such funding was no small matter: lack of funds scuttled the plans of Princeton physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, who had hoped to organize a conference on foundations of quantum mechanics in the early 1980s.95 Several participants in the est-backed conferences, including Feynman, Jackiw, and Coleman, developed warm personal relationships with Erhard, exchanging frequent letters, holiday cards, and anniversary greetings, stretching over a decade. They occasionally met outside the confines of the physics conferences, enjoying dinners at fine restaurants or taking in short sailing trips. When Erhard’s marriage ended—rather publicly—in a disputatious divorce in 1983, some of the physicists received early word from Erhard and replied with personal letters of support. Jackiw wrote to Erhard a few years later to express his appreciation that their relationship extended beyond their official conference duties.96

  All that came to an end in 1991 when Erhard sold off his est assets to a collection of employees.97 “San Francisco is
talking,” announced Newsweek magazine: the “embattled est guru” had “seemingly disappeared under a cloud of bad publicity.” The news echoed around the world. A headline in Sydney, Australia, blared, “Lawyers chase seminar guru,” the story alleging that Erhard had “pulled up stakes and gone fishing leaving behind an avalanche of litigation.” The Times of London proclaimed, “New Age guru goes into hiding.” Nonsense, Erhard’s attorney clarified: “His whereabouts are definitely known,” the lawyer explained to the Newsweek journalist.98 All the same, Erhard had hit a difficult patch. A string of deeply critical media reports had appeared, some laced with lurid allegations (which were later retracted).99 An assistant wrote to some of Erhard’s regular correspondents that he had decided to change gears and close his office.100 For a time communication flowed with all the clandestine trappings of a John le Carré novel. Correspondents could send letters to a handpicked Erhard confidante, who would read them over the telephone to Erhard and share any pertinent reactions with the original sender. Other times a letter or two would trickle in directly from Erhard, but with no return address.101

  Fundamental Fysiks Group members like Jack Sarfatti only overlapped in their receipt of Erhard funds for a few months with leading lights like Harvard’s Sidney Coleman and MIT’s Roman Jackiw. The significance of their bond was not the duration of time during which they each benefited from Erhard’s generosity, but the fact that physicists from across the discipline’s broad spectrum found themselves relying on private patronage from some of the same unusual patrons. Sarfatti’s eager embrace of Erhard’s funds (at least for a while) proved not to be so different from the creative opportunism with which his more acclaimed colleagues dabbled. Likewise, the great enthusiasm with which Sarfatti and his partners in the Physics/Consciousness Research Group and the Fundamental Fysiks Group threw themselves into New Age implications of Bell’s theorem differed in degree, not in kind, from equally earnest investigations by several accomplished physicists, none of whom could be dismissed as less than “real” members of the profession. The multiple entanglements between the Fundamental Fysiks Group and leading physicists of the day strain philosopher Karl Popper’s great good hope that clear criteria might demarcate authentic science from pseudoscience. In the face of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s ever-colorful activities, Popper’s dream of demarcation seems little more than wishful thinking.

  Chapter 9

  From FLASH to Quantum Encryption

  Nick Herbert’s erroneous paper was a spark that generated immense progress.

  —Asher Peres, 2003

  From Nick Herbert’s earliest encounters with Bell’s theorem and entanglement, something kept nagging at him. If the quantum world really were subject to such “spooky actions at a distance,” he wondered, could we harness that fundamental feature and put it to work? In the closing paragraphs of his succinct rederivation of Bell’s theorem, published in 1975, he mused about one possible application: “superluminal telegraphy,” using entangled quantum particles to send messages from point A to point B faster than light could travel between them. On the face of it, Herbert acknowledged, such faster-than-light signaling appeared inconsistent with Einstein’s relativity. “But,” he concluded, “the technological advantages of such a rapid communication device seem to make investigations” of such possibilities “of more than philosophical interest.”1

  What would it mean to send signals faster than light? Beyond the apparent violation of Einstein’s relativity—that would be bad enough—all manner of strange paradoxes would be unleashed. Seen from the right vantage point, superluminal signals would travel backward in time: a message would be received before it was sent. No wonder the idea makes the hairs on the backs of physicists’ necks stand on end. As one acclaimed textbook author put it recently, physicists are particularly “squeamish about superluminal influences.”2 Such chicanery dredges up all kinds of causal loopholes. You could send a retroactive telegram instructing your grandmother not to marry your grandfather. Or, on a brighter note, you could warn your forebears to divest their stock-market holdings a day before the great crashes of 1929, 2001, or 2008—the ultimate in insider trading. The possibilities would be truly Orwellian: sending messages faster than light could allow us to rewrite history to suit our present-day whims, or, as one wit put it, to “change yesterday today for a better tomorrow.” Perhaps, some argued, such signaling was already occurring. After all, what were mental telepathy and precognitive clairvoyance but messages received outside the usual channels?3

  While his paper on Bell’s theorem was in press, Herbert and other members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group continued to brainstorm about the “intrinsically almost obscenely non-local” behavior of entangled particles.4 In September 1975, Jack Sarfatti gave a presentation to the group on “Bell’s theorem and the necessity of superluminal quantum information transfer.” A month later, Herbert followed up with his own presentation on “Bell’s theorem and superluminal signals.”5 That December, Berkeley physicist and Fundamental Fysiks Group member Henry Stapp also weighed in. As he put it, “the central mystery of quantum theory is ‘how does information get around so quick?’” To Stapp, Bell’s theorem and the landmark experiment by group member John Clauser led to the “conclusion that superluminal transfer of information is necessary.”6

  And so the agenda was set. The question of superluminal information transfer, and whether it could be controlled to send signals faster than light, would occupy Herbert, Sarfatti, and the others for the better part of a decade. Their efforts instigated major work on Bell’s theorem and the foundations of quantum theory. Most important became known as the “no-cloning theorem,” at the heart of today’s quantum encryption technology. The no-cloning theorem supplies the oomph behind quantum encryption, the reason for the technology’s supreme, in-principle security. The all-important no-cloning theorem was discovered at least three times, by physicists working independently of each other. But each discovery shared a common cause: one of Nick Herbert’s remarkable schemes for a superluminal telegraph. Little could Herbert, Sarfatti, and the others know that their dogged pursuit of faster-than-light communication—and the subtle reasons for its failure—would help launch a billion-dollar industry.

  Like Nick Herbert, Jack Sarfatti was quick to appreciate some of the practical payoffs that a faster-than-light communication device would bring. In early May 1978, Sarfatti prepared a patent disclosure document on a “Faster-than-light quantum communication system.” The document was the first step in a formal patent application. In addition to filing his disclosure with the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks in Washington, DC, he sent a copy to Ira Einhorn, scrawling across the top: “Ira—please circulate widely!” (This was a year before Einhorn would be arrested for murder; his “Unicorn preprint service” was still in full swing.) Sarfatti’s proposal bore several signs of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s discussions. It began by citing Clauser’s experimental tests of Bell’s theorem, before citing a preprint of Henry Stapp’s paper on superluminal connections, which Sarfatti most likely received directly from Stapp at one of the group’s weekly meetings.7

  Sarfatti’s device consisted of a source that emitted pairs of entangled photons, which were directed at two detectors, A and B. The detectors were located far enough apart that no light signal could travel between them before each had completed its measurement on the incoming photons. The experimenter at detector A could choose whether to let the photons pass through a double slit and produce the usual interference pattern on a screen or to insert a slit detector in the photons’ path to measure through which slit each had passed. (So far his setup was straight out of John Wheeler’s musings on the delayed-choice experiment, which few besides Sarfatti had shown any interest in to date.) Next came the twist: the experimenter at A could change the efficiency of his slit detector. When its efficiency was set to 100 percent, the slit detector would always determine through which slit each photon had passed, and hence there would never be any inter
ference pattern on the screen at A. When the efficiency was set to zero, the interference pattern would always show up. By varying the efficiency of the slit detector on his side, Sarfatti suggested, the experimenter at A could encode a message to the other experimenter, stationed at the faraway detector B. The receiver at B, Sarfatti argued, would see the interference pattern on her end alternate from sharp to washed out over time, as the transmitter at A played with the efficiency of his slit detector—all thanks to the nonlocal correlations of the entangled photons.8 (Fig. 9.1.)

  FIGURE 9.1. Jack Sarfatti’s design of a faster-than-light communication system, based on his 1978 patent disclosure document. A source shoots out pairs of photons. The experimenter at A can tune the efficiency of a slit detector. When the slit detector operates at maximum efficiency, it always determines through which slit a given photon traveled, washing out the interference pattern on the screen at A. At minimum efficiency, the slit detector fails to determine the photon’s path, and the characteristic double-slit interference pattern emerges at A. Because of quantum entanglement, Sarfatti argued, the varying sharpness of the interference pattern at A should be instantly observable in the correlated photons at B. (Illustration by Alex Wellerstein.)