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

  The media coverage was by no means limited to these “tuned-in” venues. Time magazine ran a cover story about “The Psychics” with ample space devoted to Fundamental Fysiks Group participants. Newsweek covered the group a few years later. California Living Magazine ran a long story about the “New new physics,” complete with head shots of several group members. In May 1977, the group’s Jack Sarfatti shared the podium with eccentric architect Buckminster Fuller and “five-stages-of-grief” psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as a keynote speaker at a “humanistic psychology” conference. Not long after that, the San Francisco Chronicle devoted a half-page article to Sarfatti, depicted as the latest in a long line of “eccentric geniuses” to set up shop in the city’s bohemian North Beach area. Even newspapers as far away as the New Hampshire Sunday News covered the group’s intellectual peregrinations. Virtually overnight, members of the informal discussion group had become counterculture darlings.14

  FIGURE I.1. The “new physicists” as counterculture darlings. Left (standing, left to right): Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert; (kneeling) Fred Alan Wolf, ca. 1975. Right: Jack Sarfatti as the eccentric genius of North Beach, 1979. (Left, courtesy Fred Alan Wolf; right, photograph by Robert L. Jones, courtesy Robert L. Jones and Jack Sarfatti.)

  One might be tempted to dismiss the Fundamental Fysiks Group and its antics as just one more fringe phenomenon: a colorful reminder of tie-dyed life in the 1970s, perhaps, but of little lasting significance. After all, as a sociologist observed as early as 1976, members of the group consistently posed questions and acknowledged experiences that would have “served to label the participants as mentally deranged” only a few years earlier.15 Surely some cordon sanitaire separated the group from “real” physics.

  When other sociologists turned attention to the Fundamental Fysiks Group—and related outcroppings of activity, such as studies of “plant empathy” or the international spoon-bending fad inspired by the apparently psychic feats of Israeli performer Uri Geller—they, too, framed the matter in terms of “demarcation.”16 The eminent philosopher Sir Karl Popper introduced the demarcation problem in the middle decades of the twentieth century: how do scientists draw boundaries between legitimate science and something else? The issue had little to do with truth or falsity. Popper readily acknowledged that many of today’s scientific convictions will wind up as tomorrow’s forgotten missteps. Popper was after something else, some set of criteria with which to distinguish proper scientific investigation from unscientific efforts. He had some searing examples in mind. As a young man he had experienced the convulsions that wracked daily life in his native Austria in the wake of World War I. The troubled times had inspired all manner of dogmatisms. He sought some means of separating Marxism, psychoanalysis, and astrology from the canons of scientific inquiry. What made the pursuit of those topics distinct from, say, Einstein’s relativity?17

  Since Popper’s day, philosophers have spilled much ink in pursuit of those elusive demarcation criteria. Yet sociologists have countered with case after case, showing that scientists make judgments and draw boundaries in ways that rarely stack up with the philosophers’ rarefied notions. Who is to say where the line should be drawn in any given instance? Popper’s progeny never could establish any Maginot Line of legitimacy, some set of factors that might reliably separate real science from the imposter projects that had so exercised the great philosopher.18

  The demarcation problem becomes acute in the case of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Try as we might, we cannot cleave off the group or its activities from the “real” physics of the day. Many of the members’ activities placed them on one end of a spectrum, to be sure. But no hard-and-fast dividing line separated them from legitimate—even illustrious—science. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group were entangled with mainstream physics on multiple levels, including people, patronage, and intellectual payoff. The group’s marginal position and its multiple interactions with mainstream physics provide a unique view onto what it meant to do physics during the turbulent 1970s.

  The hippie physicists of the Fundamental Fysiks Group help us map still larger transitions in American culture, beyond the shifting fortunes of physics. A few journalists in San Francisco and New York City coined the term “hippie” in the mid-1960s, searching for some way to describe the rising youth culture that was mutating beyond the “hipsters” of the 1950s Beat generation. With the media attention came the first waves of pushback. As California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan put it in 1967, after the hippie scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district had become a national obsession, a hippie was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”19 Reagan’s quip lumped together groups whom scholars have recently labored to distinguish, often with Jesuitical precision. The left-leaning hippie movement, for example, had an uneasy relationship with the “New Left,” the campus-based liberal and increasingly radical political movement associated with the Students for a Democratic Society and (ultimately) the Weather Underground. Members of the New Left aimed at organized political intervention, inspired by the civil rights movement and stoked by the escalation of the Vietnam War. The campus radicals often looked with dismay on their hippie counterculture cousins, for whom political organizations of any stripe seemed so very unhip. While the political types signed petitions and planned rallies, most hippies sought to “drop out.”20

  The hippie counterculture sported a playful worship of youth, spontaneity, and “authenticity,” a personal striving often facilitated by heavy use of psychedelic drugs. LSD, synthesized in a Swiss lab in the late 1930s, was first outlawed in the United States in 1966; possession of the drug was bumped up to a felony offense in 1968. Until that time, the psychedelic had fascinated straight-laced chemists and psychologists as well as long-haired hippies. The Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army sponsored research on effects of LSD at government laboratories and reputable research universities throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Along with psychedelics enthusiast Ken Kesey, for example, the physicist Nick Herbert, who would become a founding member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, was introduced to LSD by psychologists at Stanford University.21 Only later, over the course of the 1960s, did the drug seep into wider circulation among hordes of “tuned-in” youth. Long after the drug had been criminalized, LSD and other psychedelics, like psilocybin (from “magic mushrooms”), remained staple elements of the hippie counterculture.22

  New Age enthusiasms had also been mixed up in the hippies’ heady brew right from the start: everything from Eastern mysticism to extrasensory perception (ESP), unidentified flying objects (UFOs), Tarot card reading, and more. Research on LSD during the 1950s was often reported in parapsychology journals in between articles on mind-reading and reincarnation.23 Americans’ awareness of Eastern religions and healing practices, such as acupuncture, grew sharply following 1965 revisions to U.S. immigration law, after which immigration from Asia soared (having previously been capped by tight quotas).24 Some of the earliest underground tabloids of the budding counterculture—newspapers like the Oracle, peddled in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood beginning in 1966—featured news about yoga, astrology, and the occult alongside information on where to score the most potent psychedelic drugs.25 According to close observers, the hippie counterculture and New Age movements in the United States had fused by the early 1970s, achieving a critical mass, self-awareness, and no shortage of critics.26 Even so, the boundaries of the counterculture remained porous. One analyst likened it to a medieval crusade, a “procession constantly in flux, acquiring and losing members all along the route of march.”27

  The inherent tensions that historians have begun to identify within the hippie counterculture—leftist but not “New Left,” curious about the workings of the world but tempted by psychedelic escapism—help explain the wide range of followers whom the Fundamental Fysiks Group inspired. Their efforts attracted equally fervent support from stalwarts of the military-industri
al complex as from storied cultivators of flower power, from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and defense-contractor laboratories like the Stanford Research Institute to the Esalen Institute. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group exemplified these tensions themselves. Many threw themselves headlong into the New Age alchemy, even as they pursued serious questions at the heart of quantum theory. They shifted easily from weapons laboratories to communes, universities to ashrams.28

  All the while, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group pioneered a flood of publications about the new physics and its broader implications. Many sold handsomely; some netted national awards. Best known today are such cultural icons as The Tao of Physics (1975) by physicist and group member Fritjof Capra and The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) by the writer Gary Zukav, at the time an avid participant in the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s discussions and roommate of one of its founding members. The group also experimented with alternate ways to spread their message, inspired by and modeled on the counterculture’s underground press.29 The group’s efforts helped to bring sustained attention to the interpretation of quantum mechanics back into the classroom. And in a few critical instances, their work instigated major breakthroughs that—with hindsight—we may now recognize as laying crucial groundwork for quantum information science.

  The group of hippies who formed the Fundamental Fysiks Group saved physics in three ways. First concerned style or method. They self-consciously opened up space again for freewheeling speculation, for the kind of spirited philosophical engagement with fundamental physics that the Cold War decades had dampened. More than most of their generation, they sought to recapture the big-picture search for meaning that had driven their heroes—Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger—and to smuggle that mode of doing physics back into their daily routine.

  Second, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group latched onto a topic, known as “Bell’s theorem,” and rescued it from a decade of unrelenting obscurity. The theorem, named for the fiery Irish physicist John S. Bell, stipulated that quantum objects that had once interacted would retain some strange link or connection, even after they had moved arbitrarily far apart from each other. Bell used words like “nonlocality” and “entanglement” to describe his result. To many group members, the phenomenon seemed equally evocative of Buddhist teachings. As one group member put it in 1976, “Bell’s theorem gives precise physical content to the mystic motto, ‘we are all one.’”30 Working in various genres and media, the Fundamental Fysiks Group grappled with Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement. They struggled to make sense of it, test out its limits, and see what it might imply. In the process, they forced a few of their physicist peers to pay attention to the topic, jousting with them over its ultimate implications. From these battles, quantum information science was born.

  Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement seemed to suggest that one could use quantum theory to act at a distance, instantly. Nudge a particle here and its partner would instantaneously dance over there, regardless of whether it was nanometers or light-years away. But Einstein’s relativity forbade any force or influence to travel faster than the speed of light. The Fundamental Fysiks Group pushed relentlessly on that boundary, the seemingly weak joint in the architecture of all we know about how the universe hangs together. They had many motivations. One was dogged pursuit of the big metaphysical questions, the constant refrain of “how could the world work that way?” But there was more. If faster-than-light signaling were possible (perhaps even inevitable), then physicists would need to broaden the discipline to include even larger questions. Was action at a distance really so different from clairvoyance, psychokinesis, or the Eastern mystics’ emphasis on holism? Those were the stakes, at least as the Fundamental Fysiks Group saw them. Sitting in the Bay Area, as the counterculture and New Age movements burst into technicolor bloom, the deep mysteries of quantum physics reflected all-new hues.31

  The hippie physicists’ concerted push on Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement instigated major breakthroughs—the third way they saved physics. The most important became known as the “no-cloning theorem,” a new insight into quantum theory that emerged from spirited efforts to wrestle with hypothetical machines dreamed up by members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Akin to Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, the no-cloning theorem stipulates that it is impossible to produce perfect copies (or “clones”) of an unknown or arbitrary quantum state. Efforts to copy the fragile quantum state necessarily alter it. The fact that unknown quantum states—like the beams of light fired down long fiber-optics cables in the Vienna and Geneva demonstrations—cannot be copied is what stops eavesdroppers in their tracks. Unlike ordinary signals, to which one might surreptitiously listen, quantum-encrypted communications simply cannot be tapped without destroying the desired signal. The no-cloning theorem thus gives force to quantum encryption: it provides the mechanism by which bank transfers and election results can be transmitted with perfect security. That much is well known among today’s physicists and aficionados of quantum information science; the latest textbooks often feature the result in their opening pages.32 Less well known is that the no-cloning theorem emerged directly from the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s tireless efforts—at once earnest and zany—to explore whether Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement might unlock the secrets of mental telepathy and extrasensory perception, or even enable contact with spirits of the dead.

  Hence the brashness of my title, How the Hippies Saved Physics. Readers may well note a tinge of the same bravado, equal parts ironic and defiant, that animated Thomas Cahill’s well-known study, How the Irish Saved Civilization.33 The similarity is by design. Both books examine moments of great instability and decay in reigning institutions: the Roman empire on one hand, Cold War institutions of physics research on the other. In both accounts, an unlikely group of underdogs and castaways kept the torch of learning aflame, nursing a body of scholarship and a set of questions until the mainstream had recovered sufficiently to appreciate their importance and build on them again. That which required saving was “Western civilization” in Cahill’s case; it was a commitment to deep questioning of quantum reality in mine. Cahill casts the Irish monks of the Middle Ages in twin roles: both as cultivators of Europe’s lost heritage and as effective missionaries, replanting the seeds of learning throughout the Continent. This book focuses on down-and-out hippie physicists, whose passion for physics and for the big questions at the heart of quantum theory was implacable. They demonstrated impressive tenacity in the face of professional hardships; their zeal to share their findings and spread the word was unflappable.

  Several critics of Cahill’s account have rightly pointed out that the role of the medieval Irish is easily exaggerated. Other groups at the time proved equally adept at squirreling away the intellectual riches of Greece and Rome, tending to them, building upon them, and helping to replenish the stocks of learning throughout the European continent at a propitious moment.34 So too with the physicists at the center of this story. By no means were the individuals upon whom I focus unique. Other outcroppings of like-minded investigators existed, and at times the various groups found each other and interacted.

  Yet the Fundamental Fysiks Group—an ensemble cast from the start—played what can only be considered an outsized role. The ratio of their ambitious participation to the humbleness of their professional situation was especially striking. They weren’t just chasing new gadgets, though they certainly had these in mind and even marched a few steps down the patent-filing road. Their goal remained far more grand: changing an entire worldview. I find this mismatch between their soaring intellectual aspirations and their modest professional platform especially captivating. That they have left any mark at all—attenuated to be sure, and largely unrecognized amid today’s breathtaking successes—should give current researchers, toiling in relative obscurity, some modicum of comfort. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group threw themselves into their investigations with gust
o, keeping spirits high and enjoying every last minute of their quest. Surely there is a lesson in that.

  HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS

  Chapter 1

  “Shut Up and Calculate”

  It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene had changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

  —Victor Frankenstein, character in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

  In the spring of 1974, a most unusual meeting took place. Two physicists—Fred Alan Wolf and Jack Sarfatti, who would soon become charter members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group—sat down with Werner Erhard in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Erhard, one of the leading exponents of the “human potential movement,” was at the top of his game. His est workshops (“Erhard Seminars Training”), forerunner of today’s self-help and personal-growth industry, had already grossed several million dollars and boosted Erhard to worldwide celebrity.1 He had asked Wolf and Sarfatti to meet with him because he was fascinated by the way physicists attacked complicated and counterintuitive problems with rigor.2