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

by Kaiser, David

  Throughout the travails, Clauser found some much-needed support in the Fundamental Fysiks Group. “No subject was off limits,” he recalled recently, and “no subject was summarily dismissed as pure quackery.” That attitude contrasted sharply with the other messages he received around the laboratory. “I was given the distinct impression that, in the opinion of the faculty, my work did not amount to any real new physics, was well outside of acceptable ‘mainstream’ inquiry,…and probably amounted to a major waste of time and resources,” he explained. What a relief when the Fundamental Fysiks Group drummed up another “very lively discussion” each Friday afternoon. “We definitely had a lot of fun. We asked some fundamental questions, and I think we got some reasonable answers, too.”71

  In the mid-1970s, with his appointment at Berkeley winding down and no nibbles of interest from the academic job market, Clauser moved to nearby Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the defense laboratory dedicated mostly to nuclear weapons research at which Elizabeth Rauscher and Fred Alan Wolf had previously worked. He joined a group working on nuclear fusion for (civilian) energy production, a long-sought means of safely reproducing the nuclear reactions that power the stars, to generate energy here on Earth. Through that work, Clauser cultivated skills with a new set of experimental techniques. Whereas he had earlier worked on optical experiments, he now shifted to manipulating X-rays.72

  About a decade later he tried to set off on his own, intending to follow an entrepreneurial path as Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann had done. Clauser realized that he could tweak some techniques for high-precision X-ray imaging to design a tool that could identify underground deposits of oil and natural gas. His clever idea suggested that one could survey huge fields at one go, tens of kilometers on a side. He filed for patents and briefed executives at big oil companies. But nothing came of his efforts. In hindsight, he suffered from poor timing: the oil crisis of the early 1970s had faded from most executives’ view, and they felt flush with the oil deposits that had already been identified. No one at the time saw much need to invest in unproven techniques to hunt for unknown oil reserves. Once again Clauser had to scramble to reinvent his career.73

  His next step was to move into medical imaging. Still fascinated by X-rays, Clauser tweaked yet another experimental technique he had mastered at Berkeley and Livermore. He designed a new method for high-contrast imaging. By exploiting the precision interference techniques he had honed in other contexts, Clauser could produce vast improvements in sensitivity for radiography, especially in soft tissues. He converted his garage at home to a makeshift laboratory and began to apply for new patents. He also applied for research grants from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. This time his luck began to improve. He secured a string of research grants to develop noninvasive imaging tests for breast cancer. On his own, in his garage, scrounging for spare parts, Clauser designed a “passive biopsy”: a means of identifying various masses or growths inside the body without having to intervene surgically.74

  In his roundabout way, Clauser thus fashioned a research career in medical physics. He kept up his interest in Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement, and spoke often at conferences during the 1980s and (especially) 1990s, after the topic moved squarely into the mainstream. Four decades after he first latched onto Bell’s theorem and began doggedly pursuing experimental tests, Clauser’s efforts received commensurate recognition when Clauser and two other physicists won the 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics. Many physicists consider the Wolf Prize, awarded each year by a private foundation in Israel, to be second in prestige only to the Nobel Prize. Clauser shared the $100,000 prize with two other entanglement pioneers: Alain Aspect, whose experiments in Paris during the early 1980s had further captivated members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group; and Anton Zeilinger, the Vienna-based physicist who masterminded the 2004 quantum-encrypted bank transfer (among other things). At long last Clauser’s many years of hiding in the metaphorical closet, trading ideas about Bell’s theorem with other members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, paid off.75

  In the late 1990s, decades after the Fundamental Fysiks Group had broken up, George Weissmann and Elizabeth Rauscher struck up a conversation. Feeling nostalgic for the old days, each shared with the other how important the group had been in their lives, an importance they had only come to appreciate with the passage of time. They decided to organize a reunion. They would bring the old group back together to reminisce, to trade stories of what they had done since those days, and to share their latest ideas about physics and consciousness. Equally important, Weissmann and Rauscher realized, the reunion should commemorate what their ragtag group had stood for, what it had achieved.76

  Just like in the old days, they set to work. Henry Dakin, the toy manufacturer and onetime patron of the spin-off Consciousness Theory Group, offered to host the reunion in his office space in San Francisco. Rauscher and Weissmann tracked down mailing addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and fax numbers. They invited their past friends and colleagues to reconvene for a twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, to be held on November 18, 2000.77

  In their invitation, Rauscher and Weissmann wrote poignantly about “those heady days,” back when the group had been active. “At a time when we had been very lonely in our individual investigations,” the Fundamental Fysiks Group had provided “a community of kindred spirits which acted as a resonance board and source of both constructive critique and encouragement for our ideas.” Even more: the group had “provided the first peer group in which we were free to truly pursue our ideas beyond conventional limits, in which we could dare to express our deepest and boldest thoughts.”78

  Their peers responded in kind. Nearly all the core members from the old days attended. In addition to Rauscher and Weissmann, John Clauser and Nick Herbert reconnected with Jack Sarfatti, Fred Alan Wolf, and Saul-Paul Sirag; Fritjof Capra traded stories with Russell Targ. Each person spoke for fifteen minutes on life and work since the Fundamental Fysiks Group, followed by a roundtable and free-form discussion among group members. An audience of a few dozen more observed the proceedings, some of whom had been occasional participants in the Fundamental Fysiks Group in the past, others of whom had begun to follow individual members’ work since that time.79

  Elizabeth Rauscher opened her presentation by projecting a series of photographs of group members from the 1970s. The photos elicited just the mix of nostalgia and wonder—“how could we ever have looked so young?”—that one might expect. But she concluded on a more serious note. Standing there before her former friends and colleagues, Rauscher intoned her articles of faith:

  What I conclude about life so far is this: The search for truth is the fundamental driving force behind me and what I do. The telling of truth has gotten me in a lot of trouble. I believe in nonlocality; I believe nonlocality is real. Quantum mechanics is probably very fuzzy stuff. Reality is better described by more than four dimensions. Most of everything, I think, is spirit, and a little is condensed out as matter. I believe in remote viewing, precognition, psychokinesis—because I did it—remote healing effects on at least bacteria systems, electromagnetic effects on biological systems. UFOs are a question mark. Life and death exist. And interestingly enough, it only takes one experiment to find out that you believe in life, because it only takes the birth of one child. And I have to tell you the truth: ghosts are real. I and another person—my business partner, colleague, co-patenter, and husband—also saw the same ghost, and described it the same way. We can have peace, love, and joy on this planet, instead of war, crime, and violence. Instead of warships, we need peaceship.80

  A fitting credo for the Fundamental Fysiks Group.

  Coda

  Ideas and Institutions in the Quantum Revival

  If a culture cannot afford an area in itself where pure nonsense happens, and where it is not practical, it has no objectives, it was for no reason whatsoever…then this culture is dead.
/>   —Alan Watts, 1967

  We need some periods of anarchy when new or irreverent thoughts and changes can come forward.

  —Stephen Wiesner, 2009

  Brimming with ideas, the friends gathered for another session of their informal discussion group. Ever frugal—none could find regular employment as a physicist—they sat around a sparse table in their favorite café for another evening of spirited discussion. Driven by broad philosophical questions and desperate to make sense of the equations of modern physics, they read more widely than their teachers or textbooks had encouraged. Sometimes they switched gears, shifting from highbrow philosophical prattle to the nuts and bolts of machines, both real and imagined. Unhindered by academic pretense, they asked open-ended, even childlike questions. Sometimes their answers seemed downright silly, even to themselves. But still they kept at it, pounding relentlessly on the accepted interpretations, always searching for the weak spots in the edifice of modern physics.

  Just another session of the Fundamental Fysiks Group? No. This group had convened seventy years earlier in Bern, Switzerland, under an equally grandiose name: the “Olympia Academy.” A young Albert Einstein had founded the group. Physics degree in hand, Einstein had been unable to land an academic position. Perched outside the mainstream, Einstein and his discussion-mates kept up their intellectual assault on electrodynamics and early atomic theories, honing a vision that would help launch the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum theory.1

  Is that the answer? Did the Fundamental Fysiks Group succeed in transforming our ideas about quantum theory and communication because they arranged their group in a fashion similar to Einstein and company’s? Alas, no. Physicists have come to know the “Einstein syndrome” all too well. Despite earnest protestations from unsolicited correspondents, not every person with a background in physics and a penchant for asking bizarre-sounding questions is the next Einstein.2

  I got a taste of the phenomenon as an undergraduate. A curious individual rode into town on his bicycle, took a job as a dishwasher at the local inn, and began holding court on the campus green. He had convinced himself that the entire universe was one big plutonium atom, Earth just a tiny electron orbiting around the cosmic nucleus. He became so enamored of his theory that he legally changed his name to Ludwig Plutonium. Like members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, he had been trained in physics and mathematics, and had even spent some time as a teacher. Like them, he turned to some unconventional means of spreading the word, largely by taking out full-page advertisements in the student newspaper, densely filled with equations.3

  We are back to philosopher Karl Popper’s dilemma: how to separate legitimate science from the many pretenders. Popper and most philosophers looked to the world of ideas, hoping to isolate some special intellectual approach or scientific method that might plainly distinguish authentic science from the chaff. Historians and sociologists largely agree that the philosophers’ quest came up empty. Nor have alternative schemes, sought in the realms of institutions or social relations, fared any better.4 The three examples above—Einstein and the Olympia Academy, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and Ludwig Plutonium—make clear that marginalization bears no necessary relationship to Popper’s long-sought demarcation criteria. Geniuses like Einstein have been shoved to the margins; but so too have other eccentric characters, whose ideas have rightfully been ignored.

  Instances of marginalization will not solve Popper’s demarcation riddle. But examples like the Fundamental Fysiks Group can teach us other important lessons about how science works. The hippie physicists’ exploits illuminate the relationship between science and counterculture, the intertwining of ideas and institutions, and the ultimate roots for the revival of interest among today’s leading quantum physicists in questions that had once been derided as “mere philosophy.”

  Neither the next Einsteins nor crackpots who could just be ignored, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group toiled on the margins of physics during an unusually turbulent time. Amid the worst budget crunch and jobs crisis the field had seen for decades, the physics discipline’s boundaries became especially plastic. The Cold War template had been challenged. Ways of doing physics and models for being a physicist were up for grabs again. Several group members grew their hair long; they explored the psychedelic drug scene; they daydreamed about quantum physics while reclining, naked, in Esalen’s hot spring baths. Yet still they remained part of “real” physics. The Fundamental Fysiks Group’s stubborn tenacity—our inability to dismiss the group from the court of science, even as members stretched the typical role of the physicist—provides insights into the wider phenomenon of science and the counterculture.

  The American counterculture attracted its first chronicler from the academy rather early in its course. Princeton-trained historian Theodore Roszak tried to capture some of the ferment in his 1969 study, The Making of a Counter Culture. He grabbed a term (“counterculture”) that had bounced around among academic sociologists and used it to brand the still-inchoate youthful rebellion. By that time journalists had already devoted dozens of breathless stories to stunts like the January 1967 Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, or the carnivalesque antiwar march that summer led by Yippie protesters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, in which tens of thousands of dazed hippies tried to exorcise evil spirits from the Pentagon by using their communal energy and hip vibe to levitate the massive building, hoping to hasten the end of the Vietnam War.5

  On first blush, Roszak seemed to blame technocracy for the rise of the counterculture. At the time he was writing, technocracy—the unquestioned rule of elite experts toiling away at their jobs, machinelike, while modern society careened further from its values or moorings—seemed a dystopia made real. How else could one characterize Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s by-the-numbers prosecution of the war in Vietnam, with spreadsheets of abstract kill ratios camouflaging the bloody realities on the ground? But Roszak pressed further. On his reading, the counterculture emerged not just as a rejection of technocracy, but of the entire “scientific world-view of the Western tradition.” The flower children aimed not just to stamp out the rule of experts, Roszak concluded. Their goal was nothing less than the “subversion of the scientific world view” itself. To Roszak, the disaffected youth—wrapping themselves in their beads, buckskin, and bell-bottoms, swooning from one Eastern or occult enthusiasm to the next—fled from science “as if from a place inhabited by plague.”6

  As the 1960s and 1970s have receded to the domain of history, a new generation of historians has tried to make sense of the counterculture and New Age movements. By and large they have echoed Roszak’s analysis. Whatever these movements might have sprung from, these historians agree, the counterculture and New Age revival represented a flat rejection of modern science. The hippies and flower children craved authenticity, spontaneity, and experience, we are told: the enlightenment of Eastern mystics rather than the Enlightenment of Western science.7

  Despite this fast-hardening conventional view, however, we now know that leading lights of the counterculture and New Age movements were anything but antiscience. In fact, quantum theory and Bell’s theorem served as intellectual anchors for many New Age speculations. Icons of the counterculture—from est inventor Werner Erhard to Esalen founder Michael Murphy, psychedelic proselytizers Ira Einhorn, Timothy Leary, and more—proved to be eager patrons of the new physics. Rather than reject modern science they actively sought it out, paying handsomely for the privilege to learn about the latest developments.

  The Fundamental Fysiks Group certainly benefited from this countercultural appetite for modern physics. Others did as well. During that turbulent time, similar groups sprang up, as loose and informal as the Fundamental Fysiks Group, whose members likewise chased the deep, metaphysical questions that their mainstream scientific colleagues had overlooked or ignored. Consider, for example, the “Dynamical Systems Collective” (also known as the “chaos cabal”), a bunch of physics graduate stud
ents at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Toiling in the lean years of the 1970s, well after the physicists’ Cold War bubble had burst, they strove to understand the onset of chaos, the knife-edge division between order and disorder. Like the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s obsession with Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement, chaos theory offered a juicy set of questions that could be pursued on the cheap. No need for megabuck particle accelerators; a leaky kitchen faucet would do, its maddeningly irregular drip, drip, drip inspiring improvisational inquiries into mathematical patterns behind seemingly random phenomena. In their own way, the Dynamical Systems Collective—never more than a clubhouse name for the musty old beach house, littered with beanbag chairs and secondhand furniture, in which the graduate students gathered to brainstorm—sought the same kinds of hidden connections and holistic convergences on which the Fundamental Fysiks Group had fastened. They, too, let their imaginations run wild, leaping from the mathematics of chaos to questions about determinism, free will, and the nature of thought and intelligence. No surprise, then, that the two groups found each other. A representative from the Santa Cruz collective told the Fundamental Fysiks Group all about their research into chaos at the first Esalen workshop on physics and consciousness in 1976.8

  The Santa Cruz graduate students were able to pursue their passion with a new tool. They had latched onto some of the earliest programmable personal computers, bulky machines much closer to do-it-yourself hobby kits than the sleek consumer products so familiar today. Yet even those boxy computers embodied a countercultural ethos. They were machinic ideals, the first computers designed for personal use. Another set of Bay Area dreamers, inspired by the flowering counter-culture and setting up shop in Silicon Valley, wondered what might happen if electronic computers could be something other than the room-sized mainframes that powered the military-industrial complex. What if everyday people could access limitless information, harnessing computers for personal exploration and play? “Small is beautiful” became their rallying cry; “information wants to be free” their new mantra. These counterculture visionaries—people like the Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand and the founders of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—were hardly antiscience technophobes.9 Nor were their kin among the “appropriate technology” enthusiasts, Bay Area biotechnology pioneers, or environmental activists.10 Few if any among these groups fit the neo-Luddite profile whom Roszak and others assumed were filling out the counterculture ranks. Alongside the Fundamental Fysiks Group, cutting-edge science and technology found an easy place within the burgeoning counterculture.