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

  Early on, Rauscher decided to study the very small and the very large, or, as she soon learned to specify, atoms and galaxies. She assumed that human consciousness—yet another facet of existence that she found endlessly fascinating—would lie somewhere in between. When the time came for college Rauscher enrolled at Berkeley and dove into her studies of physics. She published her first scientific article, on nuclear fusion, as an undergraduate, and completed a master’s degree in nuclear physics early in 1965. Then other realities set in. She got married, had a son, and became the sole provider for herself and her family. To pay the bills, she took a job as a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a weapons laboratory near Berkeley dating from the early years of the Cold War. Soon after arriving, she witnessed firsthand some of the earliest layoffs that presaged the physicists’ coming employment crisis. She managed to hang on to her job at Livermore and, once her son was old enough for full-day schooling, she returned to school herself, pursuing her doctorate in physics at Berkeley. She worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory—at last an official member of the lab, no longer faking her way in as a curious and pugnacious high school student. (Fig. 3.2.) Her advisor was the legendary nuclear chemist Glenn Seaborg: Manhattan Project veteran, discoverer of plutonium, Nobel laureate, and recently retired director of the Atomic Energy Commission.16

  FIGURE 3.2. Elizabeth Rauscher in the control room of the Bevatron particle accelerator at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory during her graduate studies, 1977. (Courtesy Elizabeth Rauscher.)

  Rauscher found herself asking questions in class that none of her male colleagues would broach. Since her undergraduate days, she had gotten used to being the only woman in a large class of men. At that time, nationwide, women earned only 5 percent of the undergraduate degrees in physics, and just 2 percent of the physics PhDs.17 Rauscher was a rarity indeed. She had learned to cope by wearing tweedy dresses and keeping her hair short, but still she stuck out. The dowdy clothes could not disguise the fact that she was something of a free spirit. At one point some of the men in the department complained that she sang too loudly in the halls. As a graduate student, she received anonymous threatening telephone calls; her laboratory work was sabotaged. But she realized that one couldn’t do anything in physics without a PhD, so she buckled down and decided not to let the intimidation curtail her ambition or her curiosity.18

  While still at Livermore, for example, she joined (and soon chaired) the Livermore Philosophy Group, also known as the “Tuesday Night Club.” As a flyer from 1969 advertised, the informal group sought to “enjoy the closeness and warmth of friendship, to laugh a little (a solely human response) and find a small meaning or measure of joy in lighthearted humor”—all within a government laboratory founded solely to design and test nuclear weapons. Once back at Berkeley as a graduate student, Rauscher continued in the same vein. She began offering short summer courses at the laboratory under the rubric “philosophy of science,” focused on the relations between science and society. The lectures and “rap sessions” revolved around many of the same freighted questions that had energized young physicists and radicalized students across the country: “Who determines the direction of scientific developments?” and “What is the motivation and purpose behind LBL [Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory] and other national laboratories?” Rauscher repeated the popular course several summers at Berkeley (eventually under the umbrella of the University Extension program), as well as at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.19

  In keeping with her broad interests, she wandered into Arthur Young’s Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley soon after it opened, still puzzling through questions that she had first posed as a child. What was the nature of human thought, and where was its place in the cosmos? Young, an inventor and aeronautical engineer, had become captivated by all things occult: Eastern mysticism, alchemy, extrasensory perception. He recruited another young physics student, Saul-Paul Sirag, as soon as he opened his institute in August 1973, so the two could talk about physics and what it might have to say about these farther-flung topics. After crossing paths at the institute, Rauscher and Sirag launched into their own series of conversations.20

  Sirag’s journey to the institute had been a long one. Born in Dutch Borneo to missionary parents, he and his family spent nearly three years in Japanese internment camps on Java during World War II. (Only after the war did they learn that Sirag’s father had perished in one of the camps; the men had been separated from the women and children.) Sirag made his way to Berkeley in 1961 to study physics as an undergraduate, but dropped out during his senior year to pursue theater throughout the Bay Area and New York City. He grew his hair long, looking like a cross between Albert Einstein and Jimi Hendrix. (Fig. 3.3.) When a befuddled reporter for the New York Daily News covered a local-interest story early in the “summer of love”—June 1967—Sirag was right in the thick of it. “Police were nowhere to be found” at Tompkins Square Park in New York’s lower East Side, the reporter noted, “as some 500 weirdly dressed patrons of love-ins clapped their hands in rhythm as they marched behind ‘The Grateful Dead,’ a guitar playing group of mangy hippies from the West Coast.” The newspaper ran a huge photo of Sirag (“a bearded, wild-haired apostle of the hip group”) as he took in “the scene,” to accompany the story.21 His efforts in avant-garde theater nabbed a little notoriety as well. At least twice the Village Voice spotlighted Sirag in some of his local theatrical productions.22 His big chance came when he was cast for a part in the original Broadway production of Hair, which opened in 1968; he had already acted in smaller venues for the play’s director. But Sirag failed to scrounge up the $600 required to join the Actors’ Equity union, so he was unable to accept the part.23

  On the heels of that disappointment, Sirag returned to Berkeley. He sat in on classes at the university without enrolling, and he made ends meet by picking up freelance writing jobs for small underground newspapers. He was fascinated by modern physics—often the subject of his newspaper columns—and he leapt at the chance to work with Arthur Young at his new Institute for the Study of Consciousness. The institute provided more than cerebral stimulation; it doubled as living quarters for the perennially cash-strapped Sirag.24

  Around the same time, Sirag met another soul on the quest for foundations at Young’s institute: Nick Herbert. Herbert had studied engineering physics as an undergraduate at Ohio State University in the late 1950s. While he was working on an internship at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, the Soviets launched Sputnik. (In Huntsville, Herbert enjoyed a private discussion with Wernher von Braun, then leading Redstone’s effort to launch the first American satellite, on the basics of ballistic rocketry.) By the time Herbert graduated, at the top of his class, fellowships for graduate study in physics had become plentiful, and he decamped for Stanford in the fall of 1959. At Stanford he learned “no-nonsense ‘shut up and calculate’ quantum mechanics”; his course used Leonard Schiff’s famously pragmatic textbook. He toiled away on nuclear scattering experiments, working with a small basement-bound particle accelerator, before completing his PhD in 1967.25

  FIGURE 3.3. Saul-Paul Sirag catching up on the news, late 1970s. (Courtesy Nick Herbert.)

  By that time the job market for physicists had begun to constrict. Herbert landed a one-year replacement job, teaching physics at tiny Monmouth College in Illinois. After that it was back to California with no job in sight. Desperate for income, he faked his resumé—listing make-believe experience as an electronics technician—and got a job on an assembly line manufacturing telephone equipment. Taking sick leaves, he snuck out periodically to interview for other jobs, including an opening for an industrial physicist at Memorex, the Silicon Valley consumer electronics manufacturer. When Herbert showed up “looking like an insane hippie,” the personnel manager insisted that Herbert get screened by a San Francisco psychologist before taking a chance on hiring him. Herbert checked out okay and got the job at Memorex, just before the company hit
a rough financial patch and fired most of its research staff (Herbert included). With effort Herbert next landed a job with the Smith-Corona Marchant Corporation in Palo Alto, California, working on then-new techniques for photocopying and ink-jet printing.26

  During his off hours, Herbert daydreamed about all those big questions he had never seen covered in his physics classes. He had worked hard to master some of the beautiful, arcane mathematics of quantum theory. But the math had not clarified one basic question: what the hell did it all mean? How could the world of atoms be nothing but a puff of probabilities, and yet conglomerations of those atoms could create something as strong and unbending as the chair on which he sat?27

  Around 1970, while those questions swirled in his head, one of Herbert’s former roommates from graduate school introduced him to Bell’s 1964 paper. Herbert was immediately fascinated. His gut reaction told him that the paper must be wrong, and he set out to disprove it. In the process he became one of Bell’s earliest converts. By 1972, he had begun delivering talks about Bell’s theorem and nonlocality throughout the Bay Area. Within a few months, he had produced the shortest derivation of Bell’s theorem, pruned to its essentials. Arthur Young invited Herbert to give a talk at the grand opening of his Institute for the Study of Consciousness, and Herbert and Sirag immediately hit it off. Delighted by their shared interests in the foundations of quantum mechanics, Rauscher in turn introduced Herbert and Sirag to John Clauser, the experimentalist then enmeshed in trying to test Bell’s theorem. Soon they were traipsing off together to inspect Clauser’s apparatus and talk about the meaning of the experimental results. As Sirag recalls, Clauser was always eager to talk about Bell’s theorem; at last a few people had begun to show some interest.28 (Fig. 3.4.) Clauser, Rauscher, and company also had the ear of Henry Stapp, a senior theoretical physicist on staff at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In fact, Stapp was in all likelihood the first physicist in the United States to pay attention to Bell’s theorem. He had joined the Theory Division at the lab right from his Berkeley PhD back in the mid-1950s, and proceeded to make a name for himself in the area of theoretical particle physics. Early in his career he visited Zurich on the invitation of Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel laureate who had helped build quantum theory during the 1920s and 1930s and who explored the subject’s mysteries with psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Later Werner Heisenberg, of uncertainty-principle fame, invited Stapp to spend a few months in Munich. These European forays stoked Stapp’s interest in philosophical matters, well beyond what his Berkeley training had inspired, and by the late 1960s Stapp had begun to dabble in the foundations of quantum mechanics.29

  FIGURE 3.4. Nick Herbert explaining his ideas about quantum physics and consciousness, late 1970s. (Courtesy Nick Herbert .)

  Stapp’s dissertation had focused on spin correlations in proton-proton scattering experiments—his roommate in graduate school, an experimentalist, worked on the Nobel Prize–winning discovery of the antiproton in 1955—so Stapp was unusually attuned to the types of correlations at the heart of Bell’s theorem. Somehow he noticed Bell’s paper, off in its obscure journal. Around the same time, he was invited to contribute a chapter to a book entitled Quantum Physics and Beyond, which another physicist was putting together. Stapp used the opportunity to write about Bell’s theorem. He submitted his paper, entitled “Correlation experiments and the nonvalidity of ordinary ideas about the physical world,” in July 1968; its sole reference was to Bell’s still-unknown 1964 article. The book’s editor asked Stapp to shorten his paper, and “in a huff,” Stapp pulled the piece altogether. When the book appeared three years later, no mention of Bell, entanglement, or nonlocality graced its 300 pages. Years later, Stapp released his 1968 preprint as an official report of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. By that time, Bell’s theorem and its implications had moved front-and-center of Stapp’s research interests. He began lecturing on the topic around the Bay Area as early as 1970, and kept up a steady stream of publications on the topic.30

  Stapp’s investigations captured the imagination of George Weissmann, like Elizabeth Rauscher a graduate student in the Theory Division at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Like so many of the others, Weissmann’s path to Berkeley and to Bell’s theorem had been anything but straightforward. From his earliest childhood, Weissmann had wanted to become a scientist. “I had since early youth seen science as the source for ultimate truth—this is my confession,” he later explained.31 Weissmann studied physics and mathematics as an undergraduate in his native Zurich, then traveled to Imperial College in London for a year of postgraduate study. He had always been interested in Einstein and his ideas about space and time; he focused on Einstein’s general relativity in London and planned to continue in that vein for his doctoral studies. He applied to the top programs in the United States, especially those few that specialized in relativity like Princeton and Caltech. He also applied to Berkeley, more as a hedge than out of any special interest in the department. He was told that he needed to take the standardized test known as the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) as part of his application process, which he dutifully did. Unbeknownst to him, however, a postal strike in Britain meant that most of the American schools to which he had applied never received his test scores. Berkeley’s physics department alerted him about the missing scores; he express-mailed a new copy and was accepted. The other departments simply rejected his application for being incomplete. And so Weissmann arrived in Berkeley in 1971.32

  Like the others, Weissmann was deeply frustrated by the lack of engagement with foundational questions in his coursework. It was all “turn-the-crank stuff.” He once asked his professor in a quantum mechanics course, “What is an electron?” The response—“Well, you can think of it as a wavefunction…”—hardly satisfied. “Quantum theory was deeply puzzling and mysterious,” as he put it recently. “What was it telling us about the nature of the world? That question was never even raised.” He gravitated toward the Berkeley staff scientist Henry Stapp, already deep into his work on the interpretation of quantum theory, and they engaged in long and involved discussions. “Stapp really taught me quantum theory,” Weissmann recalls. He was similarly attracted to the work of Geoffrey Chew, a leading particle physicist and at the time the director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Theory Division. Chew became Weissmann’s main thesis advisor.33

  During “secret seminars” in the Theory Division—an informal discussion group that Chew had devised back in the 1950s to encourage his students to work together without fear of faculty intrusion—Weissmann found himself chatting more and more with fellow-student Elizabeth Rauscher. Their discussions spilled beyond Chew’s seminar. They discovered their shared interest in whether physics might someday clarify the workings of human consciousness. In short order, they decided to hold those conversations outside—literally between the two main physics buildings at the laboratory, out of earshot of their colleagues and professors—because philosophically rooted topics like the nature of consciousness were deemed “verboten” by mainstream physicists. They knew they were onto something. But they could sense that their wide-ranging interests—“very deep issues of the meaning of life and death, and existence and non-existence, and everything in between, from the macrocosmos to the microcosmos”—would not find a welcome home in a traditional physics environment.34

  Rauscher’s and Weissmann’s advisor, Geoffrey Chew, proved more open-minded than most. Although he did not always share his students’ enthusiasms, he encouraged their pursuits. At one point he received some essays from a then-unknown postdoc working in Europe named Fritjof Capra. Capra’s essays explored parallels between modern physics and Eastern thought. Chew was not particularly interested; he passed them along to Rauscher and Weissmann with the comment, “This looks like your kind of stuff.” It was indeed. Rauscher got so excited that she helped convince Chew to invite Capra to visit the Theory Division at the Berkeley lab as an unpaid associate. Chew agreed, and Capra visited with Chew and his group during the
fall of 1973. He returned for a long-term stay beginning in April 1975.35

  The last two core members of what would become the Fundamental Fysiks Group made their way to Berkeley from southern California—by way of Europe. Their career paths and intellectual identities had come unmoored by the great dislocations that shook the physics profession in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In their roundabout way, together they found their way to Bell’s theorem and to a re-engagement with the types of questions that had attracted them to physics in the first place.

  Fred Alan Wolf completed his undergraduate studies in engineering physics at the University of Illinois in 1957 and went straight to graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles. When his advisor left campus on sabbatical in 1962, Wolf moved to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the defense laboratory near Berkeley, to complete his dissertation. (He narrowly missed overlapping with Elizabeth Rauscher at the lab.) From there he was hired by General Atomic in La Jolla, a private defense contracting firm that specialized in all things nuclear. The group was just gearing up for its work on Project Orion, an audacious plan to use exploding H-bombs to power a rocket ship. Wolf received Q clearance, the top-secret rating reserved for nuclear weapons work, and dove in.36 By 1964, it looked like he was set: he was able to lead a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. He had gotten married; soon he and his wife had two children and a nice house in La Jolla, their suburban dream come true. Yet after a year or two at General Atomic, both Wolf and his supervisor realized that his heart just wasn’t in the project. He had been pleased to see that a computer program he had written for the project, which simulated the behavior of a superhot gas of electrons and ions in the core of the exploding nuclear engines, produced good fits with the empirical data coming out of the laboratory. But on the whole, the project struck Wolf as too much gadgeteering: one more grand (even hubristic) monument of Cold War technology, but not one that would engage the really fundamental, metaphysical questions at the heart of modern physics.37