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

  HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS

  How the Hippies Saved Physics

  SCIENCE, COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE QUANTUM REVIVAL

  DAVID KAISER

  W. W. Norton & Company

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  To the memory of my father, Richard A. Kaiser.

  He was no hippie.

  There must be thousands of young persons whose nervous systems were expanded and opened-up in the 1960’s and who have now reached positions of competence in the sciences…. We expect the new wave of turned-on young mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers are more able to use their energized nervous systems as tools to provide new correlations between psychology and science.

  —Timothy Leary, 1977

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 “Shut Up and Calculate”

  CHAPTER 2 “Spooky Actions at a Distance”

  CHAPTER 3 Entanglements

  CHAPTER 4 From to Psi

  CHAPTER 5 New Patrons, New Forums

  CHAPTER 6 Spreading (and Selling) the Word

  CHAPTER 7 Zen and the Art of Textbook Publishing

  CHAPTER 8 Fringe?!

  CHAPTER 9 From FLASH to Quantum Encryption

  CHAPTER 10 The Roads from Berkeley

  CODA Ideas and Institutions in the Quantum Revival

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Interviews

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  To most residents of Vienna, April 21, 2004, probably seemed like any other spring day in the Austrian capital. Students mulled over books in cafés; tourists delighted in the Hapsburg-era gardens, museums, and opera houses; and businesspeople scurried through their appointments. Amid the bustle, however, something magical happened. The city’s mayor and the director of one of the city’s largest banks collaborated on a breathtaking experiment. Working with physicists from the University of Vienna and a spin-off company, the mayor and banker performed the first electronic bank transfer using quantum cryptography. Specially prepared beams of light transmitted an unbreakable code—an encryption key—between the bank’s branch office and city hall. If anyone else had tried to listen in on the signal, the eavesdropping would have been detected easily and unambiguously. More important, any attempt to breach security would have destroyed the sought-after signal, scrambling it into harmless, random noise. With these safeguards in place, the mayor’s money wire went through without a hitch.1

  Three years later, residents of Geneva, Switzerland, participated in a similar feat. Government officials, in cooperation with their own local physicists, employed quantum encryption to protect the transmission of electronic votes cast in the Swiss national election. As in Vienna, the communications remained perfectly secure. The laws of physics had made sure of it.2

  Advances like these belong to the fascinating, flourishing field of quantum information science. An amalgam of topics with funny-sounding names—quantum computing, quantum encryption, quantum teleportation—the field sounds more like Star Trek with each passing year. These days quantum information science sports a multi-billion-dollar research program, ten thousand published research articles, and a variety of device prototypes. The field has leaped to the cutting edge of physics, catapulted by palpable enthusiasm among research scientists, industrial partners, and government agencies around the world.3 Breathless coverage of the field can be found everywhere from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to Wired Magazine and BusinessWeek.4

  The tremendous excitement marks the tail end of a long-simmering Cinderella story. Long before the huge budgets and dedicated teams, the field moldered on the scientific sidelines. To make the latest breakthroughs possible, researchers needed to grapple with quantum theory, physicists’ famously successful (yet infamously strange) description of matter and energy at the atomic scale. The equations had been around since the 1920s. But figuring out how to interpret those equations, to parse the symbols in words and scrutinize just what they implied about the mysterious workings of the microworld—that interpretive task had long since fallen out of favor. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, most physicists recoiled from such philosophical labor. They treated the interpretation of quantum theory as a fringe topic, a fine leisure-time diversion for retired researchers in their dotage, perhaps, but not the sort of activity on which rising stars should spend their time. Thirty years ago, readers who were interested in the unsettled debates over the interpretation of quantum theory had to hunt in some out-of-the-way places. In 1979, some of the most extensive coverage appeared in an unpublished memorandum from the Central Intelligence Agency and a feature article in Oui magazine. The latter—no publication of the French embassy—was Playboy’s answer to Penthouse. Both items focused on work by physicists at the center of this story. The porn magazine’s discussion was by far the better researched and more accurate of the two.5

  Lost from view in today’s hoopla is a story, equal parts inspiring and bizarre, of scientific striving in the face of long odds. The intellectual bedrock of quantum information science—the ideas that undergird today’s quantum-encrypted bank transfers and electronic voting—took form in a setting that couldn’t have been more different from the ivory tower of academe or the citadels of business and politics. In fact, the breakthroughs in Vienna and Geneva ultimately owe their origins to the hazy, bong-filled excesses of the 1970s New Age movement. Many of the ideas that now occupy the core of quantum information science once found their home amid an anything-goes counterculture frenzy, a mishmash of spoon-bending psychics, Eastern mysticism, LSD trips, CIA spooks chasing mind-reading dreams, and comparable “Age of Aquarius” enthusiasms. For the better part of a decade, the concepts that would blossom into developments like quantum encryption were bandied about in late-night bull sessions and hawked by proponents of a burgeoning self-help movement—more snake oil than stock option.

  The woolly pursuits of the 1970s hearkened back to an earlier way of doing physics and of being a physicist. The roots of quantum information science stretch all the way back to the golden age of theoretical physics of the 1920s and 1930s, when giants like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger cobbled quantum mechanics together. From their earliest wranglings, they found themselves tangled up with all sorts of strange, counterintuitive notions. Many have become well-known catchphrases like “wave-particle duality,” “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,” and “Schrödinger’s cat.” Each signaled that atom-sized objects could behave fantastically different from what our usual experience would suggest. To Einstein, Bohr, and the rest, it seemed axiomatic that progress could only be made by tackling these philosophical challenges head on. Manipulating equations for their own sake would never be enough.6

  That style of doing physics did not last long. The clouds of fascism gathered quickly across Europe, scattering a once-tight community. The ensuing war engulfed physicists around the world. Torn from their prewar routines and thrust into projects of immediate, worldly significance—radar, the atomic bomb, and dozens of lesser-known gadgets—physicists’ day-to-day activities in 1945 bore little resemblance to those of 1925. Over the next quarter century, Cold War imperatives shaped not just who received grants to pursue this or that problem; they left an indelible mark on the world of ideas, on what counted as “real” physics. Physicists in the United States adopted an aggressively pragmatic attitude. The equations of quantum mechanics had long since lost their novelty, even if t
heir ultimate meaning still remained obscure. The pressing challenge became to put those equations to work. How much radiation would be emitted from a particular nuclear reaction? How would electric current flow through a transistor or a superconductor? As far as the postwar generation of physicists was concerned, their business was to calculate, not to daydream about philosophical chestnuts.7

  Before the war, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger had held one model in mind for the aspiring physicist. A physicist should aim, above all, to be a Kulturträger—a bearer of culture—as comfortable reciting passages of Goethe’s Faust from memory or admiring a Mozart sonata as jousting over the strange world of the quantum.8 The physicists who came of age during and after World War II crafted a rather different identity for themselves. Watching their mentors stride through the corridors of power, advising generals, lecturing politicians, and consulting for major industries, few sought to mimic the otherworldly, detached demeanor of the prewar days. Philosophical engagement with quantum theory, which had once seemed inseparable from working on quantum theory itself, rapidly fell out of fashion. Those few physicists who continued to wrestle with the seemingly outlandish features of quantum mechanics found their activity shoved ever more sharply to the margins.9

  Before there could be a field like quantum information science—and long before demonstrations like those in Vienna and Geneva could even be imagined—a critical mass of researchers needed to embrace a different mode of doing physics once more. They had to incorporate philosophy, interpretation, even bald speculation back into their daily routine. Quantum physicists needed to daydream again.

  Rarely can we date with any precision the ebbs and flows of scientists’ research styles or intellectual approaches. Yet these transitions—the how’s and why’s behind major shifts in a scientific field’s reigning questions and methods—have long held a special fascination for me. We see laid bare in these moments a messy alchemy, intermixing the world of institutions with the world of ideas. Brilliant insights and dazzling discoveries take their place alongside political decisions, funding battles, personal rivalries, and cultural cues. These many ingredients combine to make one agenda seem worth pursuing in a particular time and place—and worth teaching to students—while quietly eclipsing other questions or approaches that had beckoned with equal urgency only a few years earlier.

  In the case of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which ultimately spawned quantum information science, we may detect just such a seismic shift in the 1970s. The physics profession in the United States suffered the lashings of a perfect storm between 1968 and 1972. Internal audits at the Department of Defense led to massive cutbacks on spending for basic research, which had financed, directly or indirectly, nearly all graduate training in physics for decades. Desperate for more soldiers to feed the escalation of fighting in the Vietnam War, meanwhile, military planners began to revoke draft deferments for students—first for undergraduates in 1967, then, two years later, for graduate students as well—reversing twenty years of draft policies that had kept physics students in their classrooms. Across the country, the Cold War coalition between the Pentagon and the universities crumbled under wave after wave of teach-ins and sit-ins, ultimately lost in a tear gas fog. Amid the turmoil, the nation’s economy slid into “stagflation”: rising inflation coupled with stagnant economic growth. All at once, physicists faced massive budget cuts, a plummeting job market, and vanishing student enrollments.10

  As the Cold War nexus of institutions and ideas collapsed, other modes of being a physicist crept back in. The transition was neither smooth nor painless. Caught in the upheavals, a ragtag crew of young physicists banded together. Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, both graduate students in Berkeley, California, founded an informal discussion group in a fit of pique and frustration in May 1975. From their earliest years they had been captivated by books about the great revolutions of modern physics: relativity and quantum theory. They had entered the field with heads full of Einstein-styled paradoxes; they, too, dreamed of tackling the deepest questions of space, time, and matter. Yet their formal training had offered none of that. By the time they entered graduate school, the watershed of World War II and the hyperpragmatism of the Cold War had long since shorn off any philosophical veneer from physics students’ curricula. In place of grand thoughts, their classes taught them narrow skills: how to calculate this or that physical effect, rather than what those fancy equations might portend about the nature of reality.

  The two students had ties to the Theoretical Physics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a sprawling national laboratory nestled in the Berkeley hills. They decided to do for themselves what their teachers and textbooks had not. Reserving a big seminar room at the lab, they established an open-door policy: anyone interested in the interpretation of quantum theory was welcome to attend their weekly meetings, joining the others around the large circular table for free-ranging discussions. They continued to meet, week in and week out, over the next three and a half years. They called themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group.”

  Their informal brainstorming sessions quickly filled up with like-minded seekers. Most members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group found themselves on the periphery of the discipline for reasons beyond their immediate control. Although they held PhDs from elite universities like Columbia, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Stanford, their prospects had dried up or their situations had become untenable with the bust of the early 1970s. Adrift in a sea of professional uncertainty, the young physicists made their way to Berkeley. Finding themselves with time on their hands and questions they still wanted to pursue, they gravitated toward Rauscher and Weissmann’s group. They met on Friday afternoons at 4 P.M.—an informal cap to the week—and the spirited chatter often spilled late into the night at a favorite pizza parlor or Indian restaurant near campus.

  The group’s intense, unstructured brainstorming sessions planted seeds that would eventually flower into today’s field of quantum information science; they helped make possible a world in which bankers and politicians shield their most critical missives with quantum encryption. Along the way, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, together with parallel efforts from a few other isolated physicists, contributed to a sea change in how we think about information, communication, computation, and the subtle workings of the microworld.

  Despite the significance of quantum information science today, the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s contributions lie buried still, overlooked or forgotten in physicists’ collective consciousness. The group’s elision from the annals of history is not entirely surprising. On the face of it, they seemed least likely to play any special role at all. Indeed, from today’s vantage point it may seem shocking that anything of lasting value could have come from the hothouse of psychedelic drugs, transcendental meditation, consciousness expansion, psychic mind-reading, and spiritualist séances in which several members dabbled with such evident glee. History can be funny that way.

  While the physics profession foundered, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group emerged as the full-color public face of the “new physics” avant-garde. Hovering on the margins of mainstream physics, they managed to parlay their interest into a widespread cultural phenomenon. They cultivated a new set of generous patrons, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to self-made entrepreneurs like Werner Erhard, guru of the fast-expanding “human potential movement.” With money pouring in from these untraditional sources, the Fundamental Fysiks Group carved out new institutional niches in which to pursue their big-picture discussions. Most important became the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, fabled incubator of all things New Age. For years on end, members of the group organized workshops and conferences, freely mixing the latest countercultural delights—everything from psychedelics like LSD to Eastern mysticism and psychic mind-reading—with a heavy dose of quantum physics.

  To many journalists at the time, the Fundamental Fysiks Group seemed too go
od to be true. What better reflection of the times than to see physicists grappling with the problems of consciousness, mysticism, and the paranormal? The earliest coverage showed up in underground arenas dedicated to celebrating, not just reporting, the latest countercultural twists and turns. On the heels of his critically acclaimed films The Godfather and American Graffiti, for example, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola bought the fledgling City of San Francisco magazine. One of its earliest issues after Coppola’s renovation devoted a two-page spread to several core members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, focusing on how the “new physicists” were busy “going into trances, working at telepathy, [and] dipping into their subconscious in experiments toward psychic mobility,” all the better to understand subtle quantum effects.11 A few months later some members of the group heard from Timothy Leary, the former Harvard psychology professor turned poster boy for New Age antics and all things psychedelic. At the time Leary was still in a California jail on drug charges, though he had hardly stopped working. Together with novelist and counterculture icon Ken Kesey (of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and “Merry Pranksters” fame, and the inventor of the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests”), Leary was busy editing a special issue of the quirky Bay Area magazine Spit in the Ocean, and he was eager to publish some of the far-out essays that the hippie physicists had submitted.12 Soon after that, one of the core members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, Jack Sarfatti, showed up on the cover of North Beach Magazine, another San Francisco niche publication, in full guru mode: framed by a poster of Einstein and holding a copy of physicist George Gamow’s autobiography, My World Line. When novelist and Beat generation hipster Herb Gold composed his memoirs of life among the likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, the first off-scale personality to appear in the narrative was Sarfatti, holding forth on quantum physics in the Caffe Trieste, North Beach, San Francisco.13 (Fig. I.1.)