- Kaiser, David.
How the Hippies Saved Physics.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-393-07636-3.
-
From its origin in the early years of the twentieth century
until the outbreak of World War II, quantum theory inspired
deeply philosophical reflection as to its meaning and implications
for concepts rarely pondered before in physics, such as the
meaning of “measurement”, the rôle of the
“observer”, the existence of an objective reality
apart from the result of a measurement, and whether the randomness
of quantum measurements was fundamental or due to our lack of
knowledge of an underlying stratum of reality. Quantum theory
seemed to imply that the universe could not be neatly reduced to
isolated particles which interacted only locally, but admitted
“entanglement” among separated particles which
seemed to verge upon mystic conceptions of “all is one”.
These weighty issues occupied the correspondence and conference
debates of the pioneers of quantum theory including Planck,
Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Pauli, Dirac, Born,
and others.
And then the war came, and then the war came to an end, and with it
ended the inquiry into the philosophical foundations of
quantum theory. During the conflict, physicists on all
sides were central to war efforts including nuclear
weapons, guided missiles, radar, and operations research,
and after the war they were perceived by governments as
a strategic resource—subsidised in their education
and research and provided with lavish facilities in return
for having them on tap when their intellectual capacities
were needed. In this environment, the education and culture
of physics underwent a fundamental change. Suddenly the field
was much larger than before, filled with those interested
more in their own careers than probing the bottom of deep
questions, and oriented toward, in Richard Feynman's words,
“getting the answer out”. Instead of debating
what their equations said about the nature of reality, the motto
of the age became “shut up and calculate”, and
physicists who didn't found their career prospects severely
constrained.
Such was the situation from the end of World War II through the
1960s, when the defence (and later space program) funding gravy
train came to an end due to crowding out of R&D budgets
by the Vietnam War and the growing financial crisis due to
debasement of the dollar. Suddenly, an entire cohort of
Ph.D. physicists who, a few years before could expect to
choose among a variety of tenure-track positions in academia
or posts in government or industry research laboratories,
found themselves superbly qualified to do work which
nobody seemed willing to pay them to do. Well,
whatever you say about physicists, they're nothing if
they aren't creative, so a small group of out of the box
thinkers in the San Francisco Bay area self-organised
into the
Fundamental
Fysiks Group and began to re-open the deep puzzles
in quantum mechanics which had laid fallow since the
1930s. This group, founded by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann,
whose members came to include
Henry Stapp, Philippe Eberhard, Nick Herbert, Jack Sarfatti,
Saul-Paul Sirag, Fred Alan Wolf, John Clauser, and Fritjof
Capra, came to focus on
Bell's theorem
and its implications for
quantum entanglement,
what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”,
and the potential for instantaneous communications not
limited by the speed of light.
The author argues that the group's work, communicated through
samizdat circulation of manuscripts, the occasional publication
in mainstream journals, and contact with established researchers
open to considering foundational questions, provided the impetus
for today's vibrant theoretical and experimental investigation of
quantum information theory, computing, and encryption. There is
no doubt whatsoever from the trail of citations that Nick Herbert's
attempts to create a faster-than-light signalling device led directly
to the
quantum no-cloning theorem.
Not only did the group reestablish the prewar style of doing physics,
more philosophical than computational, they also rediscovered the
way science had been funded from the Medicis until the advent of
Big Science. While some group members held conventional posts,
others were supported by wealthy patrons interested in their work
purely from its intellectual value. We encounter a variety of
characters who probably couldn't have existed in any decade other
than the 1970s including
Werner Erhard,
Michael Murphy,
Ira Einhorn,
and
Uri Geller.
The group's activities ranged far beyond the classrooms and laboratories
into which postwar physics had been confined, to the thermal baths
at
Esalen and
outreach to the public through books which became worldwide bestsellers
and remain in print to this day. Their curiosity also wandered well
beyond the conventional bounds of physics, encompassing ESP (and
speculating as to how quantum processes might explain it). This
caused many mainstream physicists to keep members at arm's length,
even as their insights on quantum processes were infiltrating the
journals.
Many of us who lived through (I prefer the term “endured”)
the 1970s remember them as a dull brown interlude of broken dreams,
ugly cars, funny money, and malaise. But, among a small community
of thinkers orphaned from the career treadmill of mainstream physics,
it was a renaissance of investigation of the most profound questions
in physics, and the spark which lit today's research into quantum
information processing.
The Kindle edition has the table of contents,
and notes properly linked, but the index is just a useless
list of terms. An
interview
of the author, Jack Sarfatti, and
Fred Alan Wolf by George Knapp on
“Coast to Coast AM” is available.
November 2011 