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

by Kaiser, David

  As Sarfatti began to explore new ideas and social circles, he emerged as something of a Renaissance courtier. He flitted from wealthy patron to wealthy patron, surviving—at times flourishing—on generous stipends rather than regular employment. One of his first benefactors following Erhard was a Berkeley-based architect. In the 1990s his major sponsor was a Silicon Valley executive and UFO enthusiast, so Sarfatti’s attention turned squarely to exotic theories of relativity and gravitation in an effort to explain how aliens might have achieved efficient interstellar travel.17 (Patrons such as the crown prince of Lichtenstein have lavished funds on other researchers with the same goal in mind.) After another dramatic falling-out with the Silicon Valley sponsor, Sarfatti found a new benefactor. Though Sarfatti remains cagey about revealing his present patron, suffice it to say that he drives around San Francisco in a mint-condition Jaguar (full leather interior) and keeps in constant contact with a diverse network of followers with his iPhone.18 These days Sarfatti bristles at the term “hippie.” As he put it recently, “I am a counter cultural radical conservative who hob nobs with Reaganites [and] billionaires,” even if at one time he “went slumming perhaps with hippies in hot tubs.”19

  As the Fundamental Fysiks Group was breaking up in 1979, meanwhile, Saul-Paul Sirag worked hard to keep some sort of group together. He continued to organize (with Nick Herbert) the Consciousness Theory Group, which had begun in Arthur Young’s Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley and then moved over to the San Francisco offices of toy manufacturer and parapsychology enthusiast Henry Dakin. Sirag also became a regular participant in a related group known as the Parapsychology Research Group, founded by remote-viewing expert and former Stanford Research Institute physicist Russell Targ. Sirag served as president of the group in 1988–89, hosting the monthly meetings. All the while he organized the annual Esalen workshops with Nick Herbert.20

  For the first few years Sirag survived on small consulting fees associated with this work. Dakin hired him as a personal advisor to help sort bogus claims about the paranormal from more promising leads. Sirag also tutored Esalen director Michael Murphy and other fixtures of the human potential movement on modern physics, squirreling away some cash whenever he could.21 To supplement these modest fees, Sirag took a job as a night watchman at a high-end apartment building in San Francisco. The job proved to be a perfect match for the diligent and hardworking Sirag. Left alone for long stretches of time each night, he pored over physics textbooks and wrote some research articles. The self-study paid off: Sirag, a college dropout, managed to publish not one but two original physics articles in the world-leading journal Nature. (Most PhD physicists who pursue ordinary academic careers never manage to get even one of their research articles through the rigorous peer review at Nature.) He followed those up with a few papers presented at national meetings of the American Physical Society in the 1980s, taking the occasional break from his nightly patrols.22

  Sirag stayed in his night-watchman job for a decade. By scrimping and saving and living quite frugally, he and his girlfriend (now wife) managed to buy a house in the suburbs north of Berkeley. That was long before housing prices in the area began to skyrocket. Once the value of his house ballooned in the late 1980s, Sirag and his wife sold the house and moved to Oregon. A few years later, he picked up some more consulting fees from Jack Sarfatti’s new patron (the Silicon Valley UFO buff). After their bitter squabbles in the early 1980s, Sarfatti and Sirag managed to patch things up. Sirag stayed with Sarfatti in San Francisco whenever he was in town, and he contributed a lengthy chapter to Sarfatti’s memoirs.23 And so both Sarfatti and Sirag managed to land on their feet, buoyed by some well-timed interventions from “angel” donors.

  Other members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group followed a different path. They morphed from PhD scientists with some university teaching experience to full-time writers. Fritjof Capra proved most successful at making the transition, building on the surprise success of his first book, The Tao of Physics. A later reviewer marveled that Capra’s Tao of Physics “inspired so many imitators that he could be said to have started a genre.” In short order, a dozen editions of the book appeared worldwide: four English-language editions published in the United States and United Kingdom, plus eight editions in various European and Asian languages. The number has continued to grow, up to forty-three editions in twenty-three languages at latest count.24

  By the time he began shopping his next book project, The Turning Point, major presses lined up for a chance to publish his work. “The difference between Tao of Physics and Turning Point was amazing,” Capra observed recently. Turning Point appeared in 1982 from the mega publisher Simon and Schuster, with a paperback edition from Bantam and another bevy of international and foreign-language editions following close behind. In that work, Capra returned to themes he had explored in Tao—the emergence of holism in recent science (such as quantum physics) and the breakdown of reductionist thinking—but moved the discussion more squarely into other fields, such as economics and ecology.25

  If The Tao of Physics had introduced Capra to a generation of readers hungry to ponder links between modern physics and age-old questions of meaning and metaphysics, The Turning Point solidified Capra’s position as a major New Age thinker, a “devotee of that grab bag of countercultural magic that has come to be called new-age philosophy,” as one reviewer put it. The book courted a wide range of admirers. Hugo Chávez, the flamboyant and outspoken president of Venezuela, hailed Capra’s Turning Point as a must-read as recently as 2006.26 Capra wrote a screenplay based on the book with his brother, a filmmaker. Released in 1992, the movie Mindwalk featured three fictional characters: a quantum physicist, a politician, and a poet. An original score by the minimalist composer Philip Glass punctuated the characters’ ruminations on science, holism, and a looming ecological crisis. “Though not exactly spontaneous and seldom witty,” the New York Times film critic noted, “it is good serious talk, a sort of feature-length op-ed piece.”27

  With his reputation (and finances) secure, Capra moved more squarely into environmental activism. He followed Turning Point with a book on the burgeoning Green movement in Western Europe, Green Politics (1984); a combination memoir and intellectual autobiography, Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People (1988); and a series of books on ecology, systems thinking, complexity theory, and sustainability—at least five books since 1990. Between 1984 and 1994 Capra directed a think tank devoted to ecological issues, the Elmwood Institute, based in Berkeley. In the mid-1990s, Capra and colleagues transformed the Elmwood Institute into the Center for Ecoliteracy, also in Berkeley, which encourages primary and secondary schools to incorporate ecology and sustainability in their curricula.28 In short, Capra performed a rather remarkable transition from unemployed physicist to celebrity author and environmental activist in the space of just one decade.

  Other members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group meandered their way toward careers as writers as well, though they never matched Capra’s commercial success. Fred Alan Wolf found that path quite by accident. His cash flow had been interrupted when he resigned from his teaching post at San Diego State; the pension he had accrued of a few thousand dollars didn’t last long. The consulting fees that Werner Erhard and George Koopman funneled through the Physics/Consciousness Research Group helped for a while, but after Sarfatti had his blowout with Erhard that source dried up as well. Wolf left the Bay Area to return to La Jolla. To save on rent, he moved into a commune that had been set up in a private house in a suburban neighborhood. A modest inheritance when his mother passed away helped for a while, but soon his financial situation became bleak.29

  Wolf, who had left a tenured full-professor position, desperately tried to think of ways he could combine his passions for quantum physics and teaching, and make some money at the same time. He transformed himself into a kind of motivational speaker. He incorporated some of the things he’d learned from Erhard—“that ‘positive-thinking’ bullshit,�
�� as he put it recently—and crafted a live act that was part magic show (he had long been an enthusiastic amateur magician), part performance art, part quantum physics lecture, and part human potential slogans. He developed larger and larger tricks, such as flashing a strobe light on a bouncing ball on stage, to give his audiences some idea about quantum randomness and probabilities. He even gave himself a stage name: “Captain Quantum.” In July 1979, Wolf (as Captain Quantum) landed a gig as the opening act for some sold-out lectures by psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, held in a 2000-seat auditorium in Los Angeles. A few months later a niche magazine devoted to occult sciences and science fiction, Future Life, ran a feature article about Wolf’s act, including a cartoon of Wolf as Captain Quantum.30

  Around that time Wolf got the idea to transform his act into a popular book. He had gotten a taste of the popular-book business a few years earlier, from his collaboration with Jack Sarfatti and Bob Toben on Space-Time and Beyond (1974). Wolf found, to his relief, that Space-Time and Beyond had sold well enough that he could attract his own literary agent and get a publisher’s contract for the new project fairly quickly. (Ira Einhorn, the agent for the earlier book, was no longer available on account of the pending murder trial.) And so Wolf’s first solo venture, Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists, appeared in 1981.31 Plugging the book on a local Seattle television morning talk show, Wolf brought along some dice and performed sleight-of-hand tricks. He emphasized for viewers that quantum probabilities, as random and mixed up as the throws of the dice, gave each person license to craft his or her own destiny. Just as the electron’s path was not predetermined, so too could people make their own way in their “youniverse.” (The lessons from Erhard seem clear.) Indeed, the show’s host enthused that thanks to Wolf’s book, “we can understand ourselves and our place in the universe, we can understand perhaps psychic phenomena better and perhaps even a concept of God more clearly with the help of the scientist.”32 The era of quantum therapeutics had arrived. As novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe had foreseen, the holistic and communal language running through so much New Age material could just as easily support a “me first” ideology.33 Wolf’s quirky book, full of cartoons and pithy aphorisms, connected with readers, generating some desperately needed royalty payments as well as critical acclaim. Taking the Quantum Leap received the American Book Award for nonfiction, beating out physicist Freeman Dyson’s celebrated book Disturbing the Universe, which had been nominated in the same category that year.34

  Since then Wolf has made his living from book deals and royalties. He published five more popular books about physics in the 1980s, writing about staple themes from his Fundamental Fysiks Group days, such as quantum physics and consciousness.35 His 1991 book, Eagle’s Quest, documented his effort to absorb the lessons of Native American shamanism, to complement his earlier excursions into Eastern mysticism. Since then he has published several more books exploring relations between quantum physics and spirituality.36 Most recently, Wolf consulted on and appeared in the controversial 2004 film What the BLEEP Do We Know? Like many of Wolf’s books, the movie built on fundamental mysteries of quantum physics to ask larger questions about free will, consciousness, and our perceptions of reality. Critics scoffed; one reviewer asked, in desperation, “do we have to indulge in bad physics to feel good?” Major film festivals refused to show it. And yet the quasi-documentary became an underground hit, earning more than $11 million in its first two years from late-night screenings and DVD sales. Though Wolf received no payment for his contributions to What the BLEEP, the film’s success redounded to him as well. He found he could charge larger speaker’s fees on his lecture circuit; sales of his latest books showed new signs of life; and his name (and face) recognition improved enormously, thanks to the brief animated cartoons that run throughout the film and the film’s sequel starring Wolf as “Dr. Quantum.” The cartoons were also made available to schools and posted on YouTube; at the time of writing, some have been viewed more than 1 million times.37 Like Fritjof Capra, then, Fred Alan Wolf has introduced much larger audiences to the questions that first brought him to the Fundamental Fysiks Group more than three decades ago.

  Of the Fundamental Fysiks Group members who turned themselves into writers, Nick Herbert was slowest to make the transition. Herbert had left his job at Smith-Corona Marchant in the mid-1970s to spend more time with his newborn son. He sank his life’s savings into a down payment on a house in Boulder Creek, California, not too far from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. He and his wife started a home school for their son and some of his friends, using facilities at a nearby YMCA. They bartered; they picked up odd jobs; Nick worked for a while as a dishwasher. But those jobs failed to cover the mortgage, so Herbert went on public assistance: a “Family Development Grant” in the parlance of the day, that is, welfare. In the early 1980s his friend from graduate-school days, Heinz Pagels—by then executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences and an accomplished popular-book author—introduced Herbert to a high-powered literary agent in New York. Herbert’s first book, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, appeared in 1985.38

  Quantum Reality was a distillation of Herbert’s years of discussions and presentations in the Fundamental Fysiks Group and the Esalen workshops, pitched for readers with little mathematical background. He paid homage to Capra’s Tao of Physics and Wolf’s Taking the Quantum Leap, then focused even more squarely than the others on Bell’s theorem and entanglement. His book contained detailed discussions of work by Fundamental Fysiks Group participants Henry Stapp and Philippe Eberhard, as well as by Esalen regular David Finkelstein. John Clauser’s experiments on Bell’s theorem—which Herbert had witnessed firsthand and discussed often with Clauser in the Fundamental Fysiks Group and the Esalen workshops—featured prominently, as did the more recent experiments by Alain Aspect in Paris. Herbert even included the sheet music for an original song, the “Bell’s theorem blues.” (“Doctor Bell say we connected. He call me on the phone. But if we really together baby, how come I feel so all alone?”) But overall the book played it fairly straight, hewing close to quantum theory and rarely veering off to more mystical or paranormal associations.39

  One reviewer crowed that Herbert’s Quantum Reality had gone “a heroic distance in making quantum reality comprehensible. His book is filled with exciting moments when even a neophyte gets the feeling he is ‘almosting it,’ as Stephen Daedalus [sic] puts it in Ulysses.”40 The book’s appeal was not limited to neophytes or James Joyce fans. A physicist and dean of science at a small college marveled that “Herbert’s clever analogies and lucid explanations” were “outstanding, and should be borrowed by teachers of quantum physics.” He urged his colleagues to adopt Herbert’s “ambitious” book for classroom use, echoing advice from earlier physicist-reviewers of Capra’s Tao of Physics. Indeed, when Herbert’s book appeared, a decade after Capra’s Tao, there still did not exist a single textbook on quantum theory that treated Bell’s theorem. As late as the mid-1990s, Herbert’s Quantum Reality still appeared on syllabi for undergraduate physics courses.41

  Herbert’s book clearly filled a niche. It sold well—more than 100,000 copies, not including sales of German and Japanese translations—and it remains in print a quarter century later.42 With his agent’s help, Herbert quickly followed up on the success of Quantum Reality with Faster than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics, which came out in 1988. A Japanese translation was published the following year. In that book, Herbert marched through many of his own hard-fought efforts to harness quantum entanglement to send superluminal signals. He presented the arguments from his QUICK and FLASH papers in accessible form and provided clear explanations of the many important results those papers had instigated, such as the no-cloning theorem.43 A third book followed soon after that, entitled Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness and the New Physics. There Herbert tackled most directly the questions of physics and consciousness that he had been exploring since the earliest days of the F
undamental Fysiks Group, including possible relations between Bell’s theorem and parapsychology. He described in some detail his playful metaphase typewriter—the device with which he had hoped to contact the spirit of Harry Houdini back in 1974—as well as Evan Harris Walker’s ideas about consciousness as a quantum hidden variable that had inspired Herbert’s giddy experimentation. Though the book attracted some fans, it never matched the commercial success of Herbert’s earlier books.44

  Buoyed by the royalties and various odd jobs, Herbert was able to return his attention to faster-than-light schemes. His latest preprint (“ETCALLHOME: Entanglement Telegraphed Communication Avoiding Light-speed Limitation by Hong Ou Mandel Effect”) circulated via the Internet in December 2007. An email announcing his latest effort teased, “O my! Another faster than light signaling scheme that’s just begging for refutation.” This time a physicist pointed out a hole in the argument within hours rather than months, but that only seemed to amuse Herbert more.45 In between his active blogging he self-publishes witty physics limericks and racy “quantum tantra” poems about encountering bare Nature. Every now and then he makes the trip over to nearby University of California at Santa Cruz to catch the latest physics department colloquium.46

  Both of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s founders, Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, followed a third path after the group disbanded. They became self-employed entrepreneurs. Rauscher didn’t adopt that role right away. After completing her dissertation in 1979, she was hired on at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as an adjunct assistant professor. She left after one year: she had grown tired of being the only woman on the physics staff at the laboratory and having to fight discrimination every day. Life had been difficult enough as a female graduate student at the lab; now the atmosphere seemed downright hostile.47