How The Hippies Saved Physics, David Kaiser, c. 2011

How The Hippies Saved Physics:

Science, Counterculture, and The Quantum Revival

David Kaiser

c. 2011 

DDS: 530.092KAI

See also this post: http://milliondollarliterature.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-age-of-entanglement-when-quantum.html.

Back in 2002, Physics World ranked "science's 10 most beautiful experiments." The list with commentary was featured in The New York Times on September 24, 2002, fifteen years ago.

Here's the list in reverse order, #10 first, going all the way to #1, posted last.

• Foucault's pendulum, proved that the earth revolved on its axis; 1851: ranked #10
• Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus, 1911: ranked #9
• Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes, lat 1500s: ranked #8
• Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference, 3rd century BC: ranked #7
• Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment, determined the gravitational constant, and the weight of the earth, late 1700s: ranked #6
• Young's light-interference experiment; questioned the theory that light consisted exclusively of particles rather than light, 1803: ranked #5 
• Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism, 1666: ranked $4
• Millikan's oil-drop experiment; confirmed the existence of the electron and determined its charge, 1909: ranked #3 
• Galileo's experiment on falling objects, late 1500s: ranked #2
• Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons, wave-particle duality; a thought experiment until actually carried out in 1961: ranked #1

Introduction

• the Cold War nexus of institutions collapsed, other modes of being a physicist crept back in
• a ragtag crew of young physicists banded together
• Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, both graduate students in Berkeley, CA
• founded an informal discussion group, May 1975
• Friday afternoons at 4:00 p.m.
• the two students had ties to the Theoretical Physics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
• the "Fundamental Fysiks Group"
• 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"
• the Fundamental Fysiks Group cared bout new institutional niches in which to pursue their big-picture discussions
• most important became the Esalen Institute of Big Sur, CA
• Fred Coppola, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey
• Jack Sarfatti -- and this may be the individual that this book focuses on
• San Francisco Chronicle
• the city's bohemian North Beach
• eminent philosopher Sir Karl Popper
• "how do scientists draw boundaries between legitimate science and something else?" -- Popper
• "hippie": a few journalists in San Francisco and New York City coined the term "hippie" in the mid-1960s -- to describe the rising youth culture that was mutating beyond the "hipsters" fo the 1950s Beat generation
• left-leaning hippie movement; "New Left"; Students for a Democratic Society; the Weather Underground
• LSD, CIA, Kesey
• New Age, UFOs
• the group of hippies who formed the Fundamental Fysiks Group saves physics in three ways
• first: concerned style or method; free-wheeling speculation ala Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger
• second: latched unto "Bell's Theorem" and rescued it from a decade of unrelenting obscurity
• third: concerted push on Bell's Theorem and quantum entanglement instigated major breakthroughs -- the third way they saved physics: the most important breakthrough: the "no-cloning theorem" -- a new insight into quantum theory that merged from spirited efforts to wrestle with hypothetical machines dreamed up by members of the group; the theorem: it is impossible to produce perfect copies (or "clones") of an unknown or arbitrary quantum state

Chapter 1
"Shut Up and Calculate"

• history of physics

Chapter 2
"Spooky Actions at a Distance"

• more history
• starts with a quote from John S Bell, 1964

Chapter 3
Entanglements

• now the real story begins with the Fundamental Fysiks Group
• opens with a quote from George Weissmann, 2008
• John Clauser
• much, much more

Chapter 4
From [wave function] to Psi

• opens with a quote from John Sarfatti, 1974
• again, a lot about Uri Geller -- were they all taken in by the scam that even Johnny Carson saw through?

Chapter 5
New Patrons, New Forums

• funding from CIA, DOD

Chapter 6
Spreading (and Selling) The Word

• Esalen's hot tubs

Chapter 7
Zen and the Art of Textbook Publishing

• catalyzed by Ira Einhorn and his contacts at major publishing firms, helped launch a new type of popular book in the 1970s: accessible books that compared striking features of modern physics, such as Bell's theorem and nonlocality, with staples of the counterculture and New Age revivals, from parapsychology to eastern mysticism
• [Steve Jobs: b. 1955; almost exactly my contemporary; in the 1970s, in the Berkeley area, he would have been 18 to 22 years old -- right in the middle of all this.]

Chapter 8
Fringe?!

• Sarfatti's dramatic break with Weerner Erhard and est in the summer of 1977

Chapter 9
From FLASH to Quantum Encryption

• would it be possible to send signals faster than light?
• RSA
• Flash

Chapter 10
The Roads from Berkeley

• after meeting every week for nearly four years, the Fundamental Fysiks Group disbanded early in 1979
• both Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, the group's co-founders, had completed their dissertations and were no longer available to manage the group's logisitcs
• Henry Stapp tried to keep it going; did not have enough time
• A. Lawrence ("Lawry") Chickering, graduate of Yale Law School; had worked for the conservative magazine National Review; returned to CA to work for Governor Ronald Reagan
• near the end of Reagan's term, Chickering founded a new political think tank in San Francisco, the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and convinced such leading conservatives as Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger to join the Institute's board
• Chickering quickly became known as the intellectual leader of the "New Age Right"
• personal responsibility
• Sarfatti's swing from political left to political right
• other members of the group discussed; where they ended up