The Fundamental Fysiks Group and similar offshoots from mainstream science flourished during the 1970s. It was an unusual time. The Cold War–era institutions, in which most group members had expected to make their careers, sustained their first serious challenge since the end of World War II. More than just budget lines were at stake; the mammoth symbols of science-based modernity had lost their sheen. Roszak was certainly correct that most young hippies looked with disdain upon the once-mighty signifiers of big science, the nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, and hulking computer mainframes. Few among them supported the massive federal outlays that had paid for the huge machines, or paid to train generations of scientists and engineers to use them.11 Yet the momentary pause in the Cold War drive for bigger, better, faster—the 1970s hiccup in the progress narrative of modernity—was hardly a dead time for science. Surprising flowers sprang from cracks in the infrastructure. They were small in scale, the kind of thing that could be financed by private patrons rather than the Atomic Energy Commission or Department of Defense. But they were long in legacy, rescuing crucial insights like Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement from near-total obscurity.
The Fundamental Fysiks Group championed Bell’s theorem and the “spooky actions at a distance” inherent in quantum theory at a time when most physicists still ignored the interpretation of quantum mechanics altogether. As we now know, their intuitions about the deep significance of Bell’s theorem paid off. And yet a topic whose importance strikes so many physicists today as self-evident had been shunned for a full decade after Bell’s original publication, castigated as less than “real” physics. Bucking the trend, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group sought out Bell’s theorem and wrestled with it, quickly coming to dominate worldwide publications on the topic. Indeed, an early review article on Bell’s theorem by group member John Clauser has become a classic, cited nearly 800 times in the scientific literature.12 Clauser’s detailed article grew directly out of his years-long engagements in Fundamental Fysiks Group discussions and the Esalen workshops.
Members of the group worked relentlessly for years on end to make sense of Bell-styled nonlocality, to sit with the quantum weirdness and follow where it might lead. Spurred by the group’s creative and spirited pursuit, physicists began to unpack exactly how the beguiling quantum connections could be squared with Einstein’s relativity. The delicate interplay between quantum entanglement and relativity inspired one physicist—a close friend and collaborator of group member John Clauser’s—to coin the phrase “passion at a distance,” a kind of Abelard and Heloise of the microworld.13 Getting all that straight—“passion” but not “action”—sprang directly from the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s efforts and instigations. In fact, every single one of the now-standard responses for how to accommodate Bell-styled nonlocality with Einstein’s relativity came either from participants in the Fundamental Fysiks Group or from other physicists’ concerted efforts to comprehend or critique their ideas. Recent breakthroughs like quantum encryption, meanwhile, rest on the bedrock of the no-cloning theorem, itself a direct offshoot of the group’s brainstorming sessions.
The physicists in the Fundamental Fysiks Group were not alone in their quest. They hashed out many results in dialogue with a handful of others who had likewise ignored prevailing fashions and delved deeply into the interpretation of quantum theory: physicists like John Wheeler, Abner Shimony, Eugene Wigner, Gerald Feinberg, Bernard d’Espagnat, and Heinz Pagels. The group’s missives ricocheted off other physicists as well—younger physicists like Alain Aspect, Wojciech Zurek, Bill Wootters, Dennis Dieks, GianCarlo Ghirardi, and Franco Selleri—often with astounding results. Several popular books written by members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, meanwhile, became publishing sensations, bringing news of Bell’s theorem and entanglement to far larger audiences.
In the years since the Fundamental Fysiks Group was active, topics like Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement have moved squarely to the center of legitimate physics. With good reason, Louisa Gilder’s recent book about Bell’s theorem, The Age of Entanglement, carries the telling subtitle When Quantum Physics Was Reborn.14 A host of breakthroughs followed in the wake of Bell’s theorem: not just quantum encryption, but quantum computing, quantum teleportation, indeed the entire kit-and-caboodle of quantum information science. Today it is no longer uncommon for Nobel laureates to debate the interpretation of quantum theory. The latest textbooks foreground topics like Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement; most now include whole chapters on the still-evolving contests over how best to interpret the quantum formalism. Physicists continue to revise curricula to strengthen students’ conceptual grasp of quantum weirdness, including nonlocality and its uneasy coexistence with Einstein’s relativity.15 Where once influential leaders of the field had castigated philosophy as a waste of time—even when it came to plumbing the deep mysteries of quantum mechanics—the latest journals, conferences, and books on quantum information science feature contributions from card-carrying philosophers alongside those from professional physicists. Even the journal Foundations of Physics, once a quirky and fledgling venture that published items like Nick Herbert’s FLASH scheme and Abner Shimony’s null-result on quantum telepathy, is currently edited by a Nobel laureate.16
Given the astounding importance of Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement today, why has the Fundamental Fysiks Group been written out of physicists’ history? When experts in quantum information science mention “LSD” these days, they don’t mean acid trips at Esalen. Invariably they have in mind the Lloyd-Shor-Devetak theorem, which stipulates an upper limit to the rate at which one person could send quantum information to a receiver using a quantum channel.17 More generally, when physicists look back on the sea change of the 1970s and 1980s—the era when working on the interpretation of quantum theory slowly gained legitimacy again, a toehold on the terrain of “real” physics—most credit the spate of new experiments rather than any hippie enclave. It was one thing to twist one’s mind up in knots over quantum weirdness, so this line of thinking goes, but quite another to confront honest-to-goodness data in the laboratory.18
That line of reasoning makes sense; physicists often argue that theirs is an empirical science, driven first and foremost by experiments. Yet if experiments drove the revival of work on interpreting quantum mechanics, then some portion of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s story should be familiar today. After all, group member John Clauser sweated through the world’s first laboratory test of Bell’s theorem back in 1972. He went on to assist several other experimentalists who sought to conduct their own tests. Likewise, Alain Aspect, whose brilliant experiments in 1982 with time-varying switches managed to close a potential loophole in Clauser’s original tests, interacted with several members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Not only did he inherit critical pieces of equipment from Clauser’s Berkeley lab, but he was also coached on the topic by physicists like Olivier Costa de Beauregard and Bernard d’Espagnat, in between their visits with the Fundamental Fysiks Group and participation in Esalen workshops. If experiments played a decisive role in legitimating interpretive work, then surely the Fundamental Fysiks Group deserves some modest portion of the credit.
But the argument that physics is a science driven by experiment is not without controversy. Many of the bitter debates over string theory in recent years, for example, have turned on the contested role of experiments (or the lack thereof) in moving the field forward.19 One might also wonder why, if physics is an experimental science, editors at the Physical Review forced Fundamental Fysiks Group member Henry Stapp to rewrite his paper in the early 1990s, removing all reference to the experiment that had gotten him thinking about modifying the equations of quantum theory.
More to the point: as John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and their colleagues learned the hard way, experiments can’t force the community to pay attention to them.20 No one welcomed Clauser’s pathbreaking experiment on Bell’s theorem back in 1972—virtually no one outsi
de the Fundamental Fysiks Group, at any rate. When Clauser’s colleagues tried to replicate the experiment a few years later at a different university, they found their requests for funding denied.21 For years after his momentous experiment (and several clever follow-ups), Clauser received little credit for his efforts. Consistently passed over for academic jobs, Clauser never caught a break in the physics job market. Prominent colleagues lobbied hard to convince department chairs across the country that Bell’s theorem constituted legitimate physics, and that Clauser was at the top of the game when it came to laboratory skill and creativity, but to no avail.
Even the breathtaking experiment that Aspect completed in Paris a decade later failed to do the trick. Like Clauser, Aspect found few physicists who showed much interest at the time. In fact, he stopped working on topics like Bell’s theorem soon after completing his now-famous experiment. He struck up an entirely new line of experiments—on laser cooling of atoms—in what he figured would be a more fashionable field. For years after he had completed what is now considered the most important experimental demonstration of quantum nonlocality, Aspect mostly found himself discussing his work with paranormal enthusiasts (for whom he had little patience) rather than fellow physicists. At one point he attended a private meeting in Paris with someone who claimed to enjoy special powers such as extrasensory perception. Aspect recalls being astonished by what he considered the naïveté of his fellow observers, who numbered among Paris’s elite bankers and other professionals. Years later, upon receiving the gold medal from France’s CNRS in 2005, Aspect was invited to bring one guest to the award ceremony. He chose Gérard Majax, a French magician who has adopted the same mantle as James “The Amazing” Randi: self-appointed debunker of paranormal claims.22
Other physicists of Clauser and Aspect’s generation experienced the same frustrations. Anton Zeilinger, the Viennese physicist who shared the 2010 Wolf Prize with Clauser and Aspect, and whose extraordinary experiments include the 2004 quantum-encrypted bank transfer, recalled similar hostility from his colleagues when he began his experiments on Bell’s theorem and quantum foundations. “There was a widespread negative attitude of the scientific community towards foundational work of that kind,” he explained. John Bell himself had tried to warn the young Zeilinger, much as he had cautioned Aspect. “In my early talks about fundamental physics experiments I could sometimes feel the dislike of such work by the older members of the audience sitting in the front row,” Zeilinger wrote. The disrespect shown toward serious efforts to interpret quantum theory—even when driven by ingenious and original experiments in the laboratory—made life difficult for Zeilinger early in his career, much as it had done for Clauser and Aspect.23
Beyond Clauser’s, Aspect’s, and Zeilinger’s individual experiences, publication patterns reveal larger trends within the field. Citations to Bell’s theorem in the literature remained flat following publication of Aspect’s experiments. As late as 1990, contributions on the subject were still dominated by the small circle of physicists who had already begun working on Bell’s theorem before Aspect completed his experiments. No stampede of physicists rushed to work on the interpretation of quantum theory in the wake of the new experiments.24 Only many years later, after interpretive work had returned to the fold, did experiments like Clauser’s, Aspect’s, and Zeilinger’s assume a retrospective importance in physicists’ reconstructions—an importance I believe they richly deserved, but which none of these experimentalists enjoyed at the time.
The return of interpretive work was no simple response to new data or experiments. Institutions, not experiments, proved to be the most critical factor in driving the change. It was a slow-grinding cultural shift—a subtle change of values and styles, a reorientation of research and pedagogical priorities set in motion by the sudden collapse of the Cold War bubble. Like most cultural shifts, the changes took hold gradually, difficult to grasp in real time and with few signposts to which one could point. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group had a hand in those developments. Looking back, their activities illuminate larger trends.
My argument is certainly not that everything the Fundamental Fysiks Group touched turned to gold. Group members were often wrong in the particulars, and many of their enthusiasms have failed to pan out. (There are very good reasons to doubt that extrasensory perception—whether or not it is real—has much to do with quantum theory, for example.)25 But members of the group were right in what mattered most. They were among the first to ask the big questions again, to return to a spirit of doing physics that had animated Einstein, Bohr, and their generation fifty years earlier. That approach to physics had fallen out of the mainstream during the decades of runaway growth that the physics profession enjoyed after World War II. The Fundamental Fysiks Group’s open-ended, small-scale, informal, discussion-based bull sessions were far better suited to the discipline’s stark new realities after the Cold War bubble had burst.
The Fundamental Fysiks Group’s legacy thus extends even beyond the particulars of Bell’s theorem. They took on the prevailing Cold War model for pursuing physics. Their critique did not center on military patronage per se. Several group members had worked at major defense laboratories like the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and retained consulting ties with the defense-contractor site at the Stanford Research Institute. Although Jack Sarfatti would occasionally fulminate against the physicists of his teachers’ generation—the “‘scientific laborers’ who made the first atomic bombs”—for having “sold out to the Defense Department,” he, too, sought funds from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon for his latest ideas about how to harness Bell’s theorem and entanglement for long-distance communication with the submarine fleet or to disable nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in flight.26 Some group members remained convinced that George Koopman, the former (or “former”?) military intelligence analyst, was funneling money to their Physics/Consciousness Research Group from deep-cover U.S. Air Force or Defense Intelligence Agency funds—and they were glad nonetheless to have Koopman’s cash in hand.27 Their critique of the Cold War routines and of the military’s influence on science remained distinct from the more familiar us-versus-them, New Left-against-the-Establishment pattern at that time.28
Their concern, instead, was to broaden the physicists’ range of approaches or methods beyond the hyperpragmatism that had marked the earlier Cold War years. They strove to expand the physics profession’s collective mental space, to push beyond what they considered a narrowness of vision that had hardened after a quarter century of instrumentalist thinking. They laced their investigations with more of the Dionysian spirit than the strictly Apollonian; as Sarfatti put it in 1976, physicists needed more “Mythos” to leaven the “Logos.” At one point Sarfatti quoted Werner Erhard’s words back to him, in a follow-up grant proposal to Erhard’s charitable foundation. “Werner makes a distinction between ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ scientists,” noted Sarfatti. The distinction turned on neither age nor rank, but on the researchers’ spirit of inquiry. Junior scientists remained trapped in a literalist mode, confusing their equations for the stuff of the world; they “confuse the symbol for the experience.” Stymied by whether an electron could be both a particle and a wave, they stop trying to find meaning in their equations altogether. But that practical, pragmatic mindset had blinded nearly the entire discipline to major breakthroughs like Bell’s theorem.29
With this broader critique, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group were among the first to refashion the daily practice of physics, along lines that some of their elders came to advocate as well. The severity with which physicists’ Cold War bubble burst in the early 1970s occasioned sustained soul-searching by many members of the profession. The National Academy of Sciences convened a blue-ribbon panel, the Physics Survey Committee, to assess the damage and plot a new course forward. MIT’s Victor Weisskopf and sixteen equally prominent colleagues from across the country organized the massive study. The group’s recommendations filled several
thick volumes, totaling nearly 3000 pages. Like members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, the committee was particularly concerned about the direction that physics had taken during the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. In their estimation, the massive buildup of physicists’ infrastructure had come at the cost of too close an association between physics and technological applications (military or otherwise). “Since the pursuit of physics always has been related to technological development, it could be assumed that the main purpose of physics education is to further our control over nature for our own immediate benefit. Such a view is both narrow and false.” Just like Sarfatti and pals in the Fundamental Fysiks Group, the Physics Survey Committee concluded that the boom years had exaggerated one among many legitimate styles in physics, and that the pragmatism required for “technological development” had crowded out other important approaches. Now that society (including its military patrons) no longer seemed willing to pay for physicists’ “technological development” at anywhere near previous levels of support, the time had come to reenvision the discipline. Physicists needed to resurrect “the quality of a quest,” and to make physics come alive as a “humanistic subject” once more.30
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