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

by Kaiser, David

  Just as he was beginning to lose enthusiasm for life at General Atomic, a recruiter came around looking for physicists to join the faculty at nearby San Diego State College (now University). The school was making a push to increase the proportion of its faculty engaged in top-flight research. Wolf decided to give teaching a try.38 Demand was still high for physicists in those years, and San Diego State made it clear that they were glad to have him. Wolf enjoyed his colleagues and he enjoyed his teaching. (Fig. 3.5.) Like so many physicists at the time, he picked up some extra consulting work on the side: first for a U.S. Navy electronics laboratory in San Diego; next for the Aerospace Research Laboratory at the Air Force’s Wright Patterson Base in Ohio. But things began to sour soon after Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967. “Suddenly all of politics became centered around tax relief,” Wolf recalled recently. “And one way to achieve tax relief was to start cutting services, such as funding to the schools.” Indeed, Reagan’s first order of business was to demand an immediate 30 percent budget cut from the University of California, with comparable spending cuts across the state’s higher education system. Faculty lines at San Diego State went unfilled when senior colleagues retired; class sizes began to rise; funding for teaching assistants began to dry up. Within a few years, Wolf says, he realized that “the apple was rotten.”39

  Other things began to happen around that time, too. Starting in 1970, strangers began dropping by his campus office—some of them students, others from the surrounding community—eager to tell him all about their “psychic visions” and “past-life reminiscences.” He had never telegraphed any interest in such topics. Perhaps, he mused, he was the only professor who did not immediately kick such visitors out of his office, so word got around. In any case, the visits stirred something inside him. He began to reflect on his own physics training. “Somewhere in all of that education,” he later wrote, “I had lost the magic. I simply accepted the physics education as an indoctrination.” The narrow focus on learning how to “manipulate the math” had steered him away from pondering bigger questions—after all, “most physicists at that time dismissed philosophical questions as not worthy of thought.” Increasingly frustrated by the cutbacks at San Diego State, and freshly inspired to explore deeper meanings in the heart of modern physics, he embarked on a worldwide tour during a 1971 sabbatical. He had lined up visiting appointments in Jerusalem, Berlin, and Paris. But his first stops were to India and Katmandu, where he had his first transcendental experience in a Buddhist temple.40

  FIGURE 3.5. Fred Alan Wolf teaching quantum theory as a professor at San Diego State College, late 1960s. (Courtesy Fred Alan Wolf.)

  Soon after his return to San Diego, Wolf received an invitation to spend six months at Birkbeck College in London. The funding and invitation had been arranged by a fellow specialist in atomic physics. Most important for Wolf, however, was the chance to meet David Bohm, the American physicist who had been forced out of the United States during the height of the 1950s red scare, just as he was piecing together his hidden-variables alternative to quantum mechanics. (Bohm’s work had inspired the young John Bell to tackle the question of quantum nonlocality.) While visiting at Birkbeck during the summer and fall of 1973, Wolf learned the ins and outs of Bohm’s hidden-variables program; he also gleaned his first inklings about Bell’s theorem and nonlocality. A colleague at the University of Paris, meanwhile, asked Wolf if he might fill in and teach some courses there, starting in January 1974. Wolf, still frustrated by the quick reversal of fortunes at San Diego State, gladly accepted. He remained in Europe, shuttling between Paris and London, for the next year.41

  A few months after Wolf returned to San Diego State from his European sabbatical, the colorful antiwar protester and head “Yippie,” Jerry Rubin, visited campus. Wolf had already met Rubin the previous year during his travels. Rubin asked Wolf what he was doing there; Wolf reminded Rubin that he was a professor of physics on the faculty. “Man, you don’t belong here,” came Rubin’s reply. Not long thereafter Wolf squabbled with his department chair over what courses Wolf would teach the following year. With Rubin’s words still ringing in his ears, Wolf decided he had had enough. He told off his department chair, marched straight to the dean’s office, and tendered his resignation. From there he made his way up to the San Francisco area and fell in with the other members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group.42

  Wolf shared many steps on this journey with his friend and San Diego State colleague Jack Sarfatti. Like Wolf, Sarfatti had started out along a then-familiar path: undergraduate physics major at Cornell; a short stay with the U.K. Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell; followed by a master’s degree from the University of California at San Diego in 1967 and a PhD from the University of California at Riverside in 1969. As a graduate student he attended a NATO summer institute on nonlinear physics in Munich, where he brushed shoulders with leaders of the field from the United States and Europe. Just three years later, he began lecturing in a series of physics summer schools sponsored by the National Science Foundation. By the early 1970s, having published a few articles in prestigious journals on quantum theory, elementary particles, and even some idiosyncratic ideas about miniature black holes, Sarfatti could list half a dozen distinguished physicists scattered across the United States, Britain, and France as references to vouch for the quality of his work.43

  FIGURE 3.6. Jack Sarfatti teaching physics at San Diego State College, early 1970s. (Courtesy Jack Sarfatti.)

  Sarfatti was hired right out of graduate school to teach at San Diego State, and given the office next to Wolf’s. (Fig. 3.6.) Within a few years, the two were sharing quarters at home, too: much like the television sitcom The Odd Couple, they each got divorced around the same time and moved in together to share the rent. Fun times ensued. At one point, Wolf and Sarfatti borrowed a home-movie camera to shoot a short film together, along with students from one of Wolf’s classes. A frolicking piece, Wolf and Sarfatti joked that it had been filmed by a blind Argentinian director. Shot on the beach in San Diego in 1971, the film explores themes of forbidden knowledge and the intersections of science and religion. Wolf wanders the beach in rabbinical garb; Sarfatti, clad only in a loincloth, struts around as Jesus Christ.44 (Think Federico Fellini meets Mel Brooks.)

  Again, like Wolf, Sarfatti began to lose enthusiasm for his position at San Diego State during the early 1970s, and indeed for the sterile direction in which he saw theoretical physics heading. He announced his new plans in a letter to renowned Princeton physicist John Wheeler in the spring of 1973. (Sarfatti had met Wheeler a few years earlier at one of the NATO summer schools.) Sarfatti declared that he would leave his “uninspiring institution” and seek out “the best possible environment to create a great and historic piece of physics. I feel impelled by history—a certain sense of destiny,” he explained. (“I recognize that I may be suffering under some sort of ‘crackpot’ delusion, but I cannot accept that as likely. In any case, I must try,” he averred.) He longed to find one of the “few places left where physics has not been ‘polluted’ by the emphasis on applications, etc.”; some place where bold ideas on fundamental questions could still find a home.45

  As if responding to this cri de coeur, the physics gods smiled on Sarfatti. Right around the time that Wolf’s invitation to Birkbeck College in London arrived, Sarfatti received a telegram from Abdus Salam. Salam was director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and would soon win the Nobel Prize for his contributions to theoretical particle physics. Sarfatti had met Salam at Harwell in the mid-1960s, and Salam had been following some of Sarfatti’s publications since then. In his telegram, Salam invited Sarfatti to spend the autumn of 1973 at the Centre in Trieste. And so, as Sarfatti put it, “like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in the movies, ‘On the Road to…,’ both Fred and I were unexpectedly on our way to Europe.” They visited each other frequently, Sarfatti often dropping by London or Paris and staying with Wolf.46 (Fig. 3.7.)

/>   Quickly the paths converged. Saul-Paul Sirag read a paper by Sarfatti, written while Sarfatti was still in Europe, and told Elizabeth Rauscher about it. Rauscher struck up a correspondence with Sarfatti while he was in Trieste, and Sarfatti dropped by Arthur Young’s Institute for the Study of Consciousness as soon as he returned to California. Meanwhile, Sarfatti had already met Fritjof Capra in Europe; they overlapped in London and Trieste. By spring 1975, with Wolf and Sarfatti back from Europe and Capra installed in Berkeley, all the pieces were in place. As Rauscher put it recently, she had “the idea that it would be easier to learn about all this material”—nonlocality and its broader implications—“if we got together for informal discussions and lectures.”47

  FIGURE 3.7. Jack Sarfatti (left) and Fred Alan Wolf (right) thinking big thoughts in Paris, 1974. (Courtesy Fred Alan Wolf.)

  As Rauscher had done years earlier with the Tuesday Night Club at Livermore, she quickly developed a routine. Every week she would meet with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory director. Given the general state of affairs at the laboratory, with morale chasing the budget cuts in a downward spiral, Rauscher usually had to listen to the director grumble at the end of yet another bad day. During a pause in the grousing, she would ask if she could reserve a large seminar room at the laboratory—in fact, the room that had once been the office of the laboratory’s founder, the great Ernest O. Lawrence himself. With the lab director’s blessing, she would next race upstairs to the audiovisual department to borrow an overhead projector, in case any of the discussion participants felt the need to share images with the group. And then, late each Friday afternoon, the room would begin to fill up with stragglers and seekers. “I had figured, if I’m going to figure out reality, I’d better get some teamwork going here, and that’s what I did,” Rauscher explained. And so, in May 1975, the Fundamental Fysiks Group was born.48

  Chapter 4

  From to Psi

  In my opinion, the quantum principle involves mind in an essential way […such that] the structure of matter may not be independent of consciousness!…Some component of the quantum probability involves the turbulent creative sublayer of ideas in the mind of the “participator.”

  —Jack Sarfatti, 1974

  Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group were certainly fascinated, even mesmerized, by Bell’s theorem and nonlocality. Yet when it came to what Einstein had called “spooky actions at a distance,” most members concluded that Einstein hadn’t known the half of it. For the Fundamental Fysiks Group had been founded not, in the first instance, to explore the meaning of Bell’s theorem, but to plumb the foundations of quantum mechanics in search of explanations for parapsychological, or “psi,” phenomena: extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, the works. For most members of the group, Bell-style nonlocality seemed tailor-made to explain curious, occultlike actions at a distance. Their interests in Bell’s theorem and in psi phenomena blossomed side by side.

  The young physicists of the Fundamental Fysiks Group launched their quest at a propitious moment. The Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and several defense laboratories across the United States were each hard at work on psi, spurred by fears of Soviet-bloc advances in mind reading and mind control. Leading representatives of the military-industrial complex had been on the parapsychology trail even before long-haired hippies embraced the New Age occult scene.1 Like psychedelic drugs in the 1960s, which had likewise spread from quintessential Cold War settings to the wide and inchoate youth movement, the Bay Area witnessed a strange conjunction in the early 1970s: cloak-and-dagger spycraft entwined with the latest enthusiasms of the flower children. In the middle of it all sat the Fundamental Fysiks Group.

  Early on, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group drew up a roadmap for their discussions. “Quantum reality” led inexorably to all manner of New Age speculations.2 (Fig. 4.1.) At first glance such a mishmash of interests must surely look bizarre: PhD physicists from elite programs dabbling in the occult? Yet on a longer view the combination appears neither shocking nor unprecedented. Both mesmerism in the 1770s and spiritualism in the 1870s had become international sensations. In both cases, leading scholars from Madras and St. Petersburg to Paris, London, Boston, and New York had formed committees and staged public demonstrations. Learned periodicals and the popular press published tens of thousands of articles debating the reality of the purported effects and evaluating possible explanations drawn from the scientific canons of the day. Indeed, spiritualism—the claim that certain special individuals, particularly sensitive “mediums,” could establish contact with the dead and, by translating the spirits’ mysterious knockings on tables or rappings on walls into specific alphabetic codes, deliver messages from beyond the grave—proved to be just the opening gambit of a broad fin-de-siècle revival of all things occult. Telepathy, psychokinesis, and alchemy all moved to center stage. In Britain, major scientific authorities, including Lord Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, William Ramsay, and William Crookes—several of whom went on to become Nobel laureates and presidents of the Royal Society—devoted decades of effort to investigating the latest claims. They urged skepticism, not outright dismissal: Rayleigh, Thomson, and many more sat through hundreds of séances, each time wondering whether this time they might hit upon unimpeachable evidence of genuine effects. Others, such as Crookes and decorated physicist Oliver Lodge, issued bold and repeated pronouncements about the reality of such “psychical” phenomena.3

  The occult revival lasted well into the early decades of the twentieth century. New societies were formed, laboratories established, and journals launched. In fact, several founders of quantum mechanics wondered whether the strange behavior of the atomic realm might lead to still stranger phenomena. Erwin Schrödinger, for one, devoted extensive effort to understanding Eastern mysticism. In unpublished notes written just before his breakthrough with quantum mechanics, Schrödinger delved into Sanskrit etymology to clarify various Hindu beliefs. Several years later he lectured a Berlin journalist about “the Brahman doctrine that the all equals the unity of consciousness,” admonishing that “it would be a vast error to believe that science knows any better or clearer answer [than the Brahman teachings] concerning these things.”4 Pascual Jordan, who helped develop quantum mechanics with Werner Heisenberg and Max Born during the 1920s, wrote a whole book about quantum physics, the Freudian unconscious, and parapsychology. The first edition appeared just as the ink was drying on the new quantum formalism; a second edition appeared two decades later. He published an English-language précis in 1955 in the Newsletter of the Parapsychology Foundation, describing how quantum theory could account for telepathy or clairvoyant visions of the future.5

  FIGURE 4.1. Saul-Paul Sirag’s roadmap for the group’s discussions, 1976. (Courtesy Saul-Paul Sirag.)

  Beginning in the early 1930s, Heisenberg’s longtime friend and fellow quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli worked closely with the psychoanalyst Carl Jung on a similar quest. For decades they sought to plumb hidden connections between quantum physics and what Jung famously called the “collective unconscious.” Not only did Pauli join Jung in scholarly studies of the history of alchemy and mysticism but the fabled physicist and Nobel laureate also kept a diary of his dreams—eventually bulging with 400 entries—over which Pauli and Jung together pored in search of clues for how “even the most modern physics lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes,” as Pauli put it. Perhaps his log of symbol-laden dreams could point the way toward “deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time.”6 Pauli wrote essays extolling the need to synthesize “rational understanding” with “the mystic experience of one-ness,” achieving the same kind of complementarity that his generation had first formulated for particle and wave.7

  Over time, however, the occult movement quietly faded from the mainstream, lumbering under the weight of so many decades of disappointments, spiked by occasional evidence of outright fraud. Whereas the Society for Psychical Resea
rch, founded in London in 1882, had quickly attracted renowned scientists and statesmen—several members of Parliament served as vice presidents of the Society alongside elite scientists, and even four-time British prime minister William Gladstone joined its ranks—by the 1950s the Society and its kin limped along on the sidelines. When the Newsletter of the Parapsychology Foundation announced in September 1955, for example, that “World-wide research moves ahead,” few outside its dwindling membership seemed to notice or care. Just a few weeks earlier the journal Science had carried a devastating critique of “science and the supernatural,” and commentators from the New York Times and Time magazine had gladly declared the field dead.8

  When members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group rediscovered the occult twenty years later, and began to investigate psi phenomena from the vantage of cutting-edge physics, they were resurrecting a once-proud tradition. Like their routes to Bell’s theorem, they bumped along crooked paths to psi. Or, as several of them would have it, perhaps it was all meant to be—just one more example of Jungian “synchronicity.”9

  Consider, for example, Jack Sarfatti’s entrance into the psi world. In the summer of 1973, soon after receiving his invitation to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy, Sarfatti happened to read a story in the San Francisco Examiner about research under way at the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI.10 SRI, much like defense-oriented laboratories at MIT and elsewhere, had been a flashpoint of student and faculty protest just a few years earlier. Much of the heat and light of the April 1969 marches and sit-ins at Stanford University focused on the vast array of classified military projects at SRI—everything from chemical weapons to Vietnam-era counterinsurgency techniques. Early in 1970, Stanford’s trustees, eager to quell the protests, spun off SRI as a private research enterprise and divested the university’s ties to it. SRI’s researchers took their defense contracts with them, only to see contract revenues plummet as the Cold War bubble burst.11