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

by Kaiser, David

  Rauscher picked up some adjunct teaching at nearby John F. Kennedy University, a small school in the Bay Area that offered extension-school courses for working adults.48 She also founded her own consulting company, Tecnic Research Laboratories. She had worked on some Navy contracts as a graduate student at Berkeley, and capitalized on the experience to land some new contracts of her own. In short order, her consulting company was working on contracts from the Naval Surface Weapons Center and the Naval Ocean Systems Command to studyionospheric effects on signal propagation. A separate three-year contract came in from the major aerospace manufacturer Martin Marietta, as part of its production work on NASA’s space shuttle program. Rauscher’s tiny laboratory won a contract from Martin Marietta to investigate ways to increase the strength of joints between metallic parts made by plasma arc welding. Other companies hired her firm to consult on semiconductors and related electronics projects. She later picked up some teaching on the side as an adjunct at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she mentored several graduate students and published articles on atomic physics, including an item in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.49

  Rauscher also expanded to biomedical topics. From her earliest work as a consultant to the Stanford Research Institute psi lab, she had been interested in phenomena like biorhythms and homeopathic (or “alternative”) medicine. During the mid-1980s, she combined her work in sensitive electronics with these long-standing interests. She received three patents in the United States and one more in Europe for devices designed to use ultra-low-intensity electric and magnetic fields as a noninvasive pacemaker for keeping a patient’s heart rate regular. The gentle vibrations were also designed to act on the brain to reduce pain.50 While pursuing those products, Rauscher volunteered for several years as president of the Parapsychology Research Group (founded by remote-viewing physicist Russell Targ), and kept up a steady stream of writing about quantum physics and parapsychology.51 More recently she has joined forces with the California-based nonprofit Institute of HeartMath to design what they call a “Global Coherence Monitoring System.” Hearkening back to Rauscher’s earlier Navy contract work, the group aims to track minute fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field, both on the ground and in the ionosphere. The goal is to determine “how the earth’s field affects human heart-rhythm patterns or brain activity, and more importantly how human stress and emotions are influenced by fluctuations in the earth’s field.” The group aims to understand how “effects of collective emotion-based human energetics” can increase an individual’s stress level; and to monitor whether shifts in the planet’s “collective human emotionality” might be correlated with—and hence used to predict—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or “similar planetary scale events.” Her interest in entanglement has truly gone global.52

  The Fundamental Fysiks Group’s other founder, George Weissmann, also caught the entrepreneurial spirit. After completing his PhD in Berkeley he returned to his native Switzerland for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, known as the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or ETH—Einstein’s alma mater. The fellowship was in theoretical particle physics, but Weissmann spent most of his time trying to replicate psychokinetic experiments that he had first learned about prior to leaving Berkeley. While in Zurich he realized that his heart just wasn’t in mainstream particle physics anymore. He heard about some traditional herbal remedies from Central Asia that a Tibetan family had begun to import into Switzerland. The herbal concoctions seemed to be wonder drugs, and Weissmann, who had long been interested in Tibetan Buddhism, was naturally curious. He returned to Berkeley and established the Padma Marketing Corporation to import and sell the product under the name “Padma 28 Tibetan Herbal Food Supplement.”53

  Setting up shop in 1981, Weissmann jumped into the nutrition supplements business early, just as it was ramping up into a multi-billion-dollar industry. While many of the food-supplement players at the time remained scattered, small scale, and quasi-underground, Weissmann built Padma into a national brand. Marketing materials at the time proclaimed that Padma 28 could treat atherosclerosis and improve blood circulation, lower cholesterol, and improve mental functioning such as memory and alertness. Later claims touted the product’s efficacy at reducing asthma, skin allergies, hemorrhoids, depression, and more. Business was booming, and Weissmann soon introduced new products beyond the original twenty-two-herb recipe. Then the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stepped in. To officials at the FDA, the claims made on behalf of Padma 28 went well beyond the domain of health-food supplement; they qualified Padma 28 as a new drug, subject to strict regulations governing clinical testing, labeling, and marketing. Consumers Union, the nonprofit organization famous for publishing the magazine Consumer Reports, also went after the product. They singled out Padma 28 as the single most dangerous product on the food-supplements market—not necessarily because the herbal remedy was harmful in itself (although they did raise concerns about one toxic ingredient), but because its marketing encouraged users to forgo professional medical treatment, even for life-threatening chest pain that could indicate a heart attack.54

  In April 1986, the Food and Drug Administration ordered all shipments of Padma 28 to be destroyed. That made little impact on the herbal remedy’s circulation, so the FDA took a bolder step the next year, issuing a permanent injunction against the product. Such injunctions were quite rare: the FDA issued only fourteen injunctions that year, out of thousands of investigations. But in the case of Padma 28, the feds noted that “the defendants were aware that their activities violated the law; and the government believed that, unless restrained by the court, the defendants would continue such violations.”55 Weissmann still believed in the remedy’s benefits—indeed, biomedical researchers in Europe continue to investigate whether the compound might be effective against leukemia, hepatitis B, and other illnesses—and two years after the FDA injunction, advertisements for the product continued to circulate under the new name “Adaptrin.” But the years of regulatory injunctions and court battles had taken their toll. Disheartened, Weissmann dissolved his company in 1989.56

  The entrepreneurial bug proved hard to shake, and a few years later Weissmann started a new business with his son. Again Weissmann’s interest turned to matters of health and nutrition, inflected with a certain New Age flavor. His son was a vegan and Weissmann a vegetarian, so they started a business to make realistic-tasting meat substitutes: “Veat,” as in “vegetarian meat.” Beginning in the early 1990s, Weissmann again built up a national brand. Soon the company had overseas production facilities, and its soy-based chicken substitutes were winning taste-test competitions at industry conventions.57 Yet the day-to-day operations of managing a large company never held the same appeal for Weissmann as the excitement of the start-up phase. Feeling financially secure, he sold his interest in Veat around 2000 so he could work full-time on a book project he had been nursing since his days in the Fundamental Fysiks Group. The book project, which Weissmann has titled the “Quantum Paradigm,” represents his decades-long effort to devise a unified theory of consciousness, parapsychology, and quantum theory.58

  Two core members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group remained more closely associated with mainstream physics, though each has endured reminders of their unusual (at times marginal) status. Henry Stapp, one of the few frequent participants in the group who had a regular position as a physicist at the time, has continued to work on quantum mechanics and consciousness from his post as senior staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.59 After years of publishing articles on Bell’s theorem and the deep meaning of nonlocality, he was approached at a conference in the early 1990s by a physicist-turned-parapsychologist. The researcher wanted to know why Stapp had never cited any of the parapsychologist’s experiments on extrasensory perception or psychokinesis, phenomena (so the researcher continued) that seemed manifestly similar to—perhaps even the result of—quantum entanglement. Stapp replied with some frankness
that he had never examined the parapsychologist’s experiments very closely and was inclined to assume that any statistically significant results claimed on behalf of psi effects arose from errors of experimental design if not “outright fraud.” But it was one thing, Stapp continued, to harbor doubts about a set of experiments and quite another to invest the time and effort to investigate or replicate the experiments himself. Thus Stapp had elected to say nothing at all in public about the experiments.60

  Sensing, perhaps, that Stapp’s reticence stemmed more from pragmatism than hard-set ideology, the parapsychologist proposed a simple, new test that the two could conduct together. Stapp would never have to leave his Berkeley office; he would never have to interact directly with any human subjects (clairvoyant or otherwise); and he could design procedures and protocols to satisfy himself that no chicanery was at play. Stapp’s interest was piqued. He had sat in the midst of the Bay Area’s psi efflorescence for decades; and here was a parapsychologist who seemed open to a fair, transparent test. Stapp agreed to the partnership.61

  They hatched an elaborate plan whereby the parapsychologist, working in Europe, would mail batches of cardboard sheets to Stapp. The sheets had rows upon rows of numbers covered by thick black tape. Upon receiving a package, Stapp was to wait for several days, look up the weather report from the New York Times for the intervening period, and extract from the newspaper—by a procedure known only to him, never communicated to his faraway lab partner—a pair of randomly selected numbers. After that (in what came to resemble a cross between Rube Goldberg contraption and John le Carré spycraft), Stapp fed those weather-related numbers into a computer program of his own design, which in turn spit out a new series of data: random strings of plus signs and minus signs. For each plus sign in a series, Stapp removed the black tape from a number in one column of the sheets sent from the parapsychologist; for each minus sign, Stapp removed the tape from a number in the other column. Further machinations ensued, until Stapp had reduced the jumble of numbers into a series of signs, plus and minus. If the signs were truly random, then their sum should average to zero: like flips of a coin, one should find as many heads as tails on average. Stapp’s job was to perform standard statistical tests on his rows of plus signs and minus signs to check whether their sum showed any bias, deviating systematically from zero.62

  And so it went for months at a time. The parapsychologist, for his part, recruited people whom he considered especially sensitive or gifted with parapsychological powers—he tended to use children and teenagers who studied martial arts—and asked them to focus all their attention on nudging the still-unexamined numbers under the black tape in Stapp’s office toward a positive bias. That is, their task was to apply psychokinesis backward in time, to change the already-printed-but-not-yet-observed numbers that lay under the thick black tape in Berkeley, such that Stapp’s numerical recipe would produce more plus signs than minus signs.

  To Stapp’s great surprise the sum of pluses and minuses did indeed trend positive. Analyzing the first half of the data—he and the parapsychologist had agreed ahead of time how many sheets they would run through over the course of the experiment—Stapp’s series of signs deviated from zero by two standard deviations. The likelihood that such a bias would occur merely by chance was less than one out of twenty. As it happens, I was an undergraduate intern at the Berkeley laboratory around this time, and I fondly remember discussing the experiment with Stapp in his office. When he came to the statistical results his eyes lit up, like a seasoned storyteller spinning a ghost story around a campfire. Such results, if they continued to hold up, would surely require some sort of explanation.63

  Intrigued, Stapp thought hard about how one might accommodate such a “causal anomaly” within established principles of physics. He turned his attention to a recent suggestion from a Nobel laureate about modifying the basic equations of quantum mechanics, which had been put forward for quite a different reason. Stapp realized that the modified equations could account for effects like those in the recent parapsychology experiment while still reproducing the usual, well-tested behavior of atoms predicted by ordinary quantum theory. With his new theoretical model worked out, Stapp wrote an article on his findings. The article began by describing the experiment and its empirical results before introducing the new theoretical ideas that were meant to explain them, following what Stapp considered to be the appropriate format for any theoretical article that aimed to account for experimental findings. He mailed off his paper to the Physical Review in March 1993, as he had done scores of times during his long career, and waited to hear back from the referees. That’s when the trouble started.64

  The referees and editor accepted Stapp’s paper. After a little while, however, Stapp received a second letter from the journal editor. Upon further consideration, the letter explained, the editor suggested that Stapp rearrange the paper, relegating details of the experiment to an appendix at the end. The goal was to shift the emphasis from parapsychology to theoretical physics. Bemused by the request—wasn’t the point of theoretical physics to explain empirical results? Stapp asked himself—Stapp nonetheless complied, and submitted a revised version of the paper that September. Still feeling uncomfortable, the journal editor sent the revised paper back to a referee, a most unusual step to take after already accepting an article. The referee, too, was stymied. “I have had to think rather long about this one,” the new report began. It continued:

  I as a referee am faced with the following problem. Here is a theory of ESP, which the author claims is consistent with an amended quantum theory. It seems to me he has every right to both create and publish such a theory. This part of the paper is for me not in question, either as to its appropriateness or result. But to present the included experiment as though it was a physics experiment is misleading, and will provoke an unpleasant response from the physics community. I thought putting it in an appendix would help, but now I am not sure…. I think this paper may well bring forth a flood of crackpot contributions from others of clearly dubious objectivity, who do not have the training of this author.

  The referee apologized for “backtracking,” but qualified that “it’s no favor to him [Stapp] to allow him to publish something that will needlessly arouse the ire of everybody, without first trying to make it as palatable as possible.”65

  The editor agreed with the referee’s advice, and offered Stapp a deal: if Stapp would remove all details of the experiment and cite a separate published account by the parapsychologist, then he could publish his theoretical model all on its own. Alternately amused and aggravated by the exchange, Stapp accepted the editor’s offer. Nearly a year and a half after its initial submission, Stapp’s heavily revised article appeared in the Physical Review.66

  Getting the paper into print proved to be only half the battle. Six months after his paper appeared, the editor-in-chief for all divisions of the Physical Review—the senior editor for the entire American Physical Society, who had not been involved with Stapp’s submission—sent Stapp a long and agitated letter chastising Stapp’s work and regretting that the paper had ever been accepted. He granted that Stapp and others were “legitimately interested in such matters as human intervention in experiment, or, even, of the nature of thought and its relation to physical ‘reality.’” But, the editor continued, “at the present time such ideas belong to the world of philosophy, not to the world of physics.” Stapp’s gravest offense, as the editor saw it, was lending credibility to parapsychologists’ claims.67

  The discussion spilled beyond private correspondence. Physics Today, a trade magazine mailed to all professional physicists in the United States, ran not one but two batches of overheated letters that had been sparked by publication of Stapp’s article. Some held up Stapp’s paper as a sign of all that was rotten in the state of physics. Others bristled that changing editorial and refereeing policies at the Physical Review—as the editor-in-chief had promised to do, in direct response to the Stapp episode—amounted to ideol
ogical censorship.68

  And what of the empirical results, the mysterious bias in the long strings of plus signs and minus signs that had captured Stapp’s attention? By the time the entire experiment had run its course, and Stapp had processed all of the agreed-upon sheets from the parapsychologist, the statistical effect had entirely washed out. The average of all those plus signs and minus signs averaged to zero, just as Stapp had expected in the first place. Try as they might, the young karate kids in Europe had not been able to nudge Stapp’s sums after all.69

  Like Henry Stapp, John Clauser managed to craft a career as a working physicist, though he has had to wander, institutionally, quite a bit further than Stapp. Even after publishing the first-ever experimental test of Bell’s theorem during his postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley in the early 1970s, Clauser could not secure an academic physics job. During the months and years after his major article appeared, supporters feverishly wrote letters to befuddled physics department chairs across the country, trying to land Clauser a tenure-track position. The department chairs needed reassurance that Clauser’s work, or, indeed, the topic of Bell’s theorem and entanglement, constituted legitimate research. “I believe he shows promise of becoming one of the most important experimentalists of the next decade,” wrote one supporter, “in spite of the fact that Clauser’s results spell trouble for my own pet theory.” But it was to no avail. Clauser never did secure an academic position; nor did the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory make much effort to keep him after his postdoctoral appointment expired.70