The Physics Survey Committee argued that the best way to accomplish such a top-to-bottom refashioning was through education. Curricula for graduate students needed to be revamped, they argued, opening up space once again for the types of students against whom the 1960s model had “discriminated.” They had in mind, for example, “the thoughtful theorist with a philosophical bent but a distaste for the routine of problem solving. Einstein’s claim concerning the deadening effect of our conventional formal education should serve as a constant reminder of the damage that might be unwittingly inflicted.” Only by critically reexamining past pedagogical practices could the discipine accomplish its much-needed “self-renewal.”31
The new classroom conditions facilitated the kinds of reforms for which the Physics Survey Committee had called. As graduate-student enrollments plummeted—down by a third in just four years, sliding to one-half of the post-Sputnik peak by the end of the 1970s—faculty across the country found that they could afford to incorporate a wider range of pedagogical techniques. Essay questions that required students to articulate their ideas with words rather than just grind through algebra began to appear again on doctoral students’ comprehensive exams. Such problems had been routine in departments across the country during the 1930s and 1940s, only to disappear when the student population exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. A new spate of textbooks on quantum mechanics also began to appear in the mid-1970s, having been conceived and written after the dramatic falloff in enrollments. Unlike books from the boom years, the new graduate-level textbooks now bulged with essay assignments and discussion questions: more than 40 percent of the homework problems now called on students to describe, in words, their evolving understanding of how to interpret the quantum formalism. Undergraduate textbooks on quantum theory followed the same trend. One prominent book from 1978 even labeled certain homework problems as “speculative question” and “interpretive question.”32
Beyond the formal curricula, leading physics departments from Stanford to Harvard began to offer informal seminars for graduate students with titles like “Speculations in physics” during the mid-1970s, after enrollments had plummeted and budgets taken a nosedive.33 Slowly, grudgingly, physicists began to make space again for the kind of freewheeling, philosophically attuned discussions that had animated the founders of quantum mechanics back in the 1920s, and that Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann had craved to re-create with the Fundamental Fysiks Group.
As pedagogical space began to open up once again for a kind of interpretive or philosophical mode, the problem became what to fill it with. Textbooks remained slow to incorporate cutting-edge developments like Bell’s theorem. Materials from the Fundamental Fysiks Group thus began to fill in the gaps. Some of the earliest lesson plans on Bell’s theorem, published in the American Journal of Physics, emerged directly from interactions with members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics kept its place on physicists’ syllabi for fifteen years.34 A few years after Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality appeared, the author of a textbook on quantum mechanics quoted liberally from the book and recommended it to students for further reading. Nearly twenty years after that—as recently as 2008—one of the latest major textbooks on quantum mechanics, written by a Stanford professor, likewise directed students to Herbert’s book as one of only four “readable accounts” on quantum theory worthy of students’ attention.35 Hatched in the hot tubs of Esalen, Herbert’s lucid book continues to educate physicists young and old about Bell’s theorem and other essential quantum mysteries.
Twenty-five years after John Clauser completed his first experimental test of Bell’s theorem, meanwhile, I had the opportunity to redo the experiment in one of my physics courses. As a PhD student in theoretical physics, I was required to complete at least one undergraduate-level course in experimental physics. The main lesson I learned throughout the semester was that I have absolutely no aptitude for working with experimental apparatus. (That should have been clear enough already.) Nonetheless, using up-to-date electronics and computers to collect the data, even an all-thumbs student like me could reproduce Clauser’s stunning results about Bell’s theorem and “spooky actions at a distance” in just a few afternoons.36 Without mentioning anyone by name, the lab manual from which my fellow students and I worked even pushed us to consider the kinds of faster-than-light schemes that Jack Sarfatti and Nick Herbert had labored over decades earlier. “The experiment suggests a number of philosophical questions,” the manual prodded. Might my faraway lab partner be able to manipulate detectors on his side of the apparatus so as to modulate the outcomes of measurements on my end, thereby sending signals faster than light? “Should you quit school and invest your last dollar in his fledgling company? Why or why not?”37 By the mid-1990s, not only had Clauser’s farsighted experiment at last entered physicists’ pedagogical canon but so too had the broader style of engaging the deep, foundational issues that the Fundamental Fysiks Group had worked so hard to foster.
Patterns of activity like these suggest a gradual shift in attitudes and assumptions, a measured reappraisal of the boundaries of legitimate physics after the Cold War template had faltered.38 The exuberant efforts of the Fundamental Fysiks Group heralded broader changes to come. They were the boisterous leading edge, forging a new vision of what physics could be.
The young hippie physicists of the Fundamental Fysiks Group had to blaze a new trail themselves, carving out their own patrons, forums, and communication outlets during the lean years of the 1970s. Just as their group was winding down, the fortunes of the physics profession began to rebound. The Reagan administration launched a second boom in Cold War spending on science and technology during the 1980s, driven, as the first boom had been, by national-security concerns. Yet with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, that second bubble burst, too. The second collapse sent droves of young physicists and mathematicians to Wall Street, where they helped to design complicated financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations: from one bursting bubble to another.39
Since that time, physicists have crafted new means to seek out and sustain the longshot efforts that might otherwise be lost or dissipated amid the discipline’s boom-and-bust cycles. New centers like the Perimeter Institute near Toronto have sprung up, funded primarily by a local booster and wireless-technology billionaire. Established in 1999, the Perimeter has sponsored physicists who work on “foundational, non-directed research”: topics like quantum gravity, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the latest puzzles in quantum information science. The Institute’s founders sought to create a safe space in which young physicists could ask questions that might not fit easily within the discipline’s prevailing fads or fashions. One can hear echoes of the earlier counterculture in the Institute’s founding documents. Organizers sought “the flattest possible hierarchy” with a “youth-oriented focus.” During the past decade, the Perimeter Institute has grown into an internationally recognized center, with an impressive Scientific Advisory Committee and a full complement of local educational and outreach activities.40
Some physicists associated with the Perimeter Institute have gone further, launching a new initiative known as “FQXi,” the “Foundational Questions Institute.” Unlike the Perimeter, FQXi has no home in physical space; it is a web-based consortium of young and energetic physicists supported by a suite of private “angel” donors. Their goal is to “catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics,” particularly those that promise some “deep understanding of reality,” but which are “unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.” Since 2006 the group has disbursed some $5 million, about the cost of endowing one senior professorship at an elite university. The money has been parceled out in dozens of modest grants, most of them a few tens of thousands of dollars each.41
Many recipients of the FQXi funds are professional physicists with some university affiliation, but the group has branched out as well.
Perhaps the best-known awardee is a young physicist, Garrett Lisi, who completed his physics training in the 1990s, just as the second Cold War bubble burst. Out of work, he wandered from ski resort to surfing village, backpacking from here to there and crashing on friends’ couches, all while pursuing his vision of a new “theory of everything”: some means of combining quantum theory with gravitation that might unify all the known forces of nature into a single überforce. Finding some way to treat gravity as a quantum phenomenon has long been a holy grail among theoretical physicists. David Finkelstein, former editor of the International Journal of Theoretical Physics and longtime participant in the Esalen workshops and the est foundation physics conferences, has dedicated most of his career to the effort. In recent years thousands of young physicists have joined the quest. Yet Lisi’s approach seemed fresh; he pursued a complementary tack to the fashionable trends in string theory. Unlike the days of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, Lisi did not need his own Ira Einhorn to put his ideas into circulation: he was able to post his papers on the central web-based physics preprint server, arXiv.org. But they garnered little attention until journalists picked up the story of the unemployed surfer-dude with his just-might-be-right theory, supported by private donations funneled through the FQXi. Following a New Yorker profile of Lisi, the surfer-physicist became a sensation—indeed, a sensation with his own vaguely countercultural ideas about setting up scientist hostels or communes in which to incubate the big ideas of tomorrow.42
Few physicists are convinced that Lisi’s model will be the last word on the topic. Like the interventions by Jack Sarfatti and Nick Herbert a generation ago, Lisi’s efforts have stirred other leading experts to clarify the underlying physics and make progress toward the ultimate goal.43 Yet whereas Sarfatti, Herbert, and the members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group had to create their perch from scratch, today a few more stable institutional bases exist to support young physicists like Lisi. Institutions like the Perimeter Institute, FQXi, and the web-based preprint server arXiv.org provide a safety net to catch those out-of-the-mainstream ideas that might otherwise have been lost to obscurity.
And so echoes of the Fundamental Fysiks Group continue to reverberate. We have overlooked contributions from collectives like the Fundamental Fysiks Group precisely because their efforts have been so smoothly reabsorbed within the mainstream, like so many once-radical innovations of the 1970s. Yoga, organic foods, networked personal computers, identity politics, even the U.S. Army’s slogan of “Be all that you can be”—cribbed from the 1970s human potential movement—fail to raise an eyebrow anymore. These days the phrase “New Age” seems like more of a marketing ploy than an alternative worldview.44
Not every part of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s efforts has been absorbed into mainstream physics, of course. Turf battles continue to break out from time to time, reminders that the boundaries of physics can still be contested. As recently as spring 2010 a minor kerfuffle erupted when two young physicists in Britain rescinded invitations to former Fundamental Fysiks Group member Jack Sarfatti and Nobel laureate Brian Josephson. Sarfatti and Josephson had been invited to participate in a conference on interpretations of quantum theory. Perhaps under pressure from senior colleagues who wanted to distance the event from the taint of parapsychology, those invitations were revoked. The resulting hue and cry reached the pages of the Times Higher Education in Britain and countless blogs around the world.45
While few Nobelists besides Josephson pay much heed to out-of-body experiences or the quantum mechanics of parapsychology, however, the last decade has seen a sharp uptick of interest in the physics of consciousness, now seen as a legitimate borderland between theoretical physics and advanced neuroscience. A prominent physicist recently returned to some of the early work by Fundamental Fysiks Group member Henry Stapp and consciousness-as-hidden-variables theorist Evan Harris Walker—totally unaware of the context in which their work had been done—to bolster his own study of quantum processes in the brain.46 Leading physicists and popular authors like Michio Kaku tackle the “physics of the impossible” these days, including excursions into telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, while keeping their heads held high and their books squarely on the New York Times best-seller list.47 Most important, we may all benefit from the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s legacy in the coming years. When our children send quantum-encrypted messages between their hyperfast quantum computers, they will be living in a world that a bunch of hippies helped to invent.
Acknowledgments
My memories of the 1970s are decidedly hazy—not because they were clouded by psychedelics, but because I was too young even to know what a “hippie” was at the time. My exploration of that era has been incomparably enriched by the generosity of many people who have shared their recollections and reminiscences with me. Several also provided correspondence, notes, and photographs from their personal collections. I am sincerely grateful to them: Alain Aspect, Larry Bartell, Charles H. Bennett, Fritjof Capra, A. Lawrence Chickering, John Clauser, Roger Cooke, Dennis Dieks, Freeman Dyson, Ira Einhorn, Werner Erhard, David Finkelstein, Robert W. Fuller, Uri Geller, GianCarlo Ghirardi, Jeffrey Goldstone, Alan Guth, David Harrison, Nick Herbert, David Hess, Roman Jackiw, Alwyn van der Merwe, Jeffrey Mishlove, Charles Petit, Norman Quebedeau, Elizabeth Rauscher, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Henry Stapp, Barbara Stevenson, Bob Toben, George Weissmann, Stephen Wiesner, Fred Alan Wolf, H. Dieter Zeh, Anton Zeilinger, John Zipperer, and Wojciech Zurek.
I could not have completed this book without a team of tireless research assistants. My thanks to Sarah Rundall, Alma Steingart, Dan Volmar, Alex Wellerstein, Lambert Williams, and Benjamin Wilson. In addition to his dogged sleuthing through all manner of texts, Alex Wellerstein also created the terrific line drawings that appear throughout the book. Librarians and archivists at several institutions proved to be remarkably helpful, including the Albert Einstein Papers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (especially Barbara Wolff); the Niels Bohr Library at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland; the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia (especially Charles Greifenstein); the Institute Archives at the California Institute of Technology (especially Bonnie Ludt and Shelley Erwin); the California History Section of the California State Library in Sacramento; the Institute Archives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (especially Nora Murphy); and the University of California at Davis (especially Daniel Goldstein).
This project began while I enjoyed a year of sabbatical at the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. I am grateful to Tim Peltason, then director of the Newhouse Center, for creating such a warm and stimulating environment, and for his personal encouragement as I began marching down the road toward this book. My friends and colleagues in my home departments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the Department of Physics, have continued to provide inspiration. My agent, Max Brockman, and my editor, Angela von der Lippe, each offered unstinting support and valuable insights. I am also indebted to Peter Skolnik for crash-course lessons on finer points of media and entertainment law.
Several friends, students, and colleagues offered comments on portions of the manuscript. My thanks to Ken Alder, Irinéa Batista, Joan Bromberg, Jimena Canales, K. C. Cole, Olival Freire, Michael Gordin, Stefan Helmreich, Caroline Jones, David S. Jones, Rebecca Lemov, Vincent Lépinay, Clapperton Mavhunga, Patrick McCray, Lisa Messeri, Latif Nasser, Chad Orzel, Mina Park, Heather Paxson, Sophia Roosth, Michael Rossi, Natasha Schüll, Sam Schweber, Hanna Rose Shell, David Singerman, Rebecca Slayton, Alma Steingart, Robin Wasserman, Lambert Williams, Rosalind Williams, Benjamin Wilson, and Nasser Zakariya. Though we might not agree on every point, I am deeply grateful for their generous input.
Writing this book has been one crazy ride. I have been lucky beyond measure to share the voyage with my beloved wife, Tracy Gleason. I began working on the book soon after our children, Ellery and Toby, were bo
rn. Now they are almost old enough to read it. My thanks to them for teaching me all about the unbreakable bonds of entanglement.
Notes
Abbreviations
AE. Albert Einstein Archives. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
EAR. Elizabeth A. Rauscher papers. Apache Junction, Arizona, in Dr. Rauscher’s possession.
GCG. GianCarlo Ghirardi papers. Trieste, Italy, in Professor Ghirardi’s possession.
HM. Henry Margenau papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
HPS. Henry P. Stapp papers. Berkeley, California, in Dr. Stapp’s possession.
JAW. John A. Wheeler papers. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
JFC. John F. Clauser papers. Walnut Creek, California, in Dr. Clauser’s possession.
NBL. Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland.
NH. Nick Herbert papers. Boulder Creek, California, in Dr. Herbert’s possession.
RPF. Richard P. Feynman papers. Institute Archives, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.
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