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

by Kaiser, David

  FIGURE 4.4. Physicist John Wheeler’s “delayed-choice” thought experiment. After a particle has passed through the wall with double slits, an experimentalist may choose whether to leave the collecting screen behind the double slit, on which the particles will fill out the familiar interference pattern; or to swivel the slit detectors into place, which will determine through which slit each individual particle traveled. (Illustrations by Alex Wellerstein.)

  To Wheeler, the central feature of quantum theory—its participatory nature—thus explained not only the outcome of this or that experiment, but the emergence of the universe itself. He cited the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides and the Enlightenment philosopher George Berkeley, names that did not often appear, as they did in Wheeler’s essay, nestled between citations to Einstein, Bohr, Richard Feynman, and Stephen Hawking. Building on all those authorities, Wheeler advanced his view: the participator “gives the world the power to come into being, through the very act of giving meaning to that world; in brief, ‘No consciousness; no communicating community to establish meaning? Then no world!’” He continued, “On this view, the universe is to be compared to a circuit self-excited in this sense, that the universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.” Or, as he returned to the theme a few years later, “Acts of observer-participancy—via the mechanism of the delayed-choice experiment—in turn give tangible ‘reality’ to the universe not only now but back to the beginning.” In case his colleagues missed the point, Wheeler again turned to a whimsical cartoon. Like his “observer” and “participator” stick figures, Wheeler’s self-actualizing universe continued to grace several of his talks and essays over the next few years.28 (Fig. 4.5.)

  FIGURE 4.5. John Wheeler’s vision of the entire universe as a “self-excited system brought into being by ‘self-reference.’” (Patton and Wheeler [1975], 565. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.)

  Wheeler pushed this line vigorously throughout the 1980s, encouraging a number of physicists to conduct actual delayed-choice experiments. Yet his basic ideas on the matter had already jelled by the mid-1970s. They dribbled out in a series of little-noticed conference talks and preprints, attracting virtually no citations in the scientific literature for the remainder of the 1970s. They were little noticed, that is, except by a small number of people like Jack Sarfatti, who struck up an active correspondence with Wheeler and received Wheeler’s latest musings by preprint and letter. In fact, Sarfatti and Wolf had tried to arrange unpaid visiting appointments with Wheeler at Princeton for their 1973 sabbaticals. “We understand that no financial support would be forthcoming during these hard times,” they explained; desks and library cards would suffice. Only after Wheeler politely declined each of their repeated requests did they take off for Europe instead. Wheeler was relieved to learn of their European invitations. “I hated so much to seem unwelcome,” he replied, which cut against his “natural eagerness to be hospitable.” He wished them well and pledged to stay in touch, which indeed he did. Wheeler sent Sarfatti a preprint of his 1974 Oxford talk, for example, complete with its “participator” stick figure and self-actualizing universe cartoons, and it made a deep impression on Sarfatti. He began to cite it and build on its ideas even before Wheeler’s essay had appeared in print.29

  Sarfatti aimed to stitch these diverse ideas together. If every quantum object were interconnected with every other via quantum entanglement (as per Bell’s theorem), and if consciousness played a central role in quantum mechanics (as Wigner and Wheeler had reasoned), then modern physics might provide a natural explanation for psi phenomena. From Wigner and Wheeler, Sarfatti took the point that everyone’s consciousness participates in shaping quantum processes, both by deciding which observations to make and by collapsing the multiplying possibilities into definite outcomes. Sarfatti recast Wigner’s main argument in terms of action and reaction. Surely matter can affect consciousness—LSD and other psychedelic drugs had made that lesson clear enough—so why not posit an equal and opposite reaction of consciousness on matter? To Sarfatti, such a move paid double dividends: it opened up a possible avenue for understanding psychokinesis, and it offered hope that Age of Aquarius students might come back to physics classrooms, finding new relevance in the subject.30

  Most mental contributions to the behavior of quantum particles, Sarfatti continued, would be “uncoordinated and incoherent”—that is, they would each push in different directions and, on average, wash out. But, as Uri Geller seemed to demonstrate, certain talented individuals might possess “volitional control” such that they could impose some order on the usually random quantum motions. Some “participators” seemed to be more effective than others. Moreover, thanks to Bell’s theorem, these individuals could exercise their control at some distance from the particles in question. In short: perhaps Geller could detect signals from far away or affect metal from across a room because the quanta in his head and the quanta far away were deeply, ineluctably entangled via quantum nonlocality. Bizarre? No doubt. But was it really any more outlandish than Wheeler’s giddy flights?31

  Sarfatti’s first effort to bring Geller and psi into the rubric of quantum physics appeared as the lead article in the inaugural issue of a brand-new journal entitled Psychoenergetic Systems. Brendan O’Regan, whom Sarfatti first met at the Stanford Research Institute psi lab before departing for Europe, helped launch the journal to feature just this kind of reasoned—and, granted, speculative—investigation into effects beyond the usual boundaries of science. O’Regan cited historians and philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Gerald Holton, who had written about the spur to new scientific breakthroughs from previous accumulations of “anomalies,” to bolster his claim that psi studies would usher in a whole new “paradigm” across the sciences. Pleased with Sarfatti’s contribution, O’Regan appended a brief comment to the opening article, arguing that the exciting recent developments in quantum mechanics meant that “physics might have to invent psychic research, if it did not already exist.” Over the next several years, the journal published many follow-up articles pursuing further relations between quantum mechanics and psi.32

  Sarfatti’s and O’Regan’s enthusiasm was hardly dampened when, a few months after his first Birkbeck dispatch, Sarfatti began to distance himself from the Geller tests. His pro-Geller press release had been published in the weekly magazine Science News, and soon the magazine was inundated with letters. Most of the letter writers called for professional magicians to test Geller alongside of, or in place of, physicists. (Magicians had served as the most effective debunkers of spiritualist mediums back in the 1890s; and none other than the great magician Harry Houdini had devoted years of effort during the 1920s to debunking the claims of psychics, mediums, and other purveyors of the paranormal.)33 Rising to the latest challenge, accomplished magicians such as James “The Amazing” Randi mobilized, proudly demonstrating that many of Geller’s famous feats could be replicated by well-known sleight-of-hand tricks. After lunching with Randi and watching him bend spoons and affect the rate at which wristwatches’ hands spun—all by the admitted power of conjuring, not psychokinesis—Sarfatti was moved to retract his earlier declaration in favor of Geller’s powers. (Randi also explained how he could make Geiger counters burst with activity: by hiding a small source of beta-radioactivity up his proverbial sleeve.) “I do not think that Geller can be of any serious interest to scientists who are currently investigating paraphysical phenomena,” Sarfatti explained in a new press release.34

  In short order, the unease that Sarfatti articulated escalated into widespread controversy over Geller’s psychic claims. “Super mystic or super fake?” asked San Diego Magazine a few years later, emphasizing in its feature article on Geller that the young Israeli performer seemed to be “eternally on trial.” A kind of cold war of Geller publications had erupted: for every debunking effort by magicians like James Randi, there also appeared a new glowing endorsement. One of the latest had come
from the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, whose experts had proclaimed that “Geller has altered the lattice structure of a metal alloy that can not be duplicated. There is no present scientific explanation as to how he did this.”35 “The enormous spate of publications did little to quell the rising controversy,” the San Diego journalist noted. “If anything, they simply added to the fire.” Critics such as magician James Randi harrumphed that they had revealed Geller’s psychic powers to be little more than skillful conjuring. Randi claimed (rather prematurely) that Geller’s continued performances, even after magicians like Randi were on his trail, amounted to “digging his own grave.” Yet all the while Geller’s admirers, fanning out across the entire world, continued to keep faith in the authenticity of his proclaimed powers.36

  As far as Sarfatti was concerned, his retraction applied to Geller, not to psi. Here again Sarfatti was following a well-trod path. Exactly a century earlier, William Crookes, J. J. Thomson, and the rest had followed the same procedure: whenever questions about a particular medium emerged, they dismissed that medium but not the notion of spiritualism in general. To Sarfatti, a whole universe of psi effects still beckoned, and their relationship with quantum mechanics remained to be explored. (More recently, Sarfatti has in effect retracted his retraction, maintaining that Geller did display at least some genuine psychic abilities.)37

  Sarfatti worked out his many ideas in conversation with Fred Alan Wolf while they were in Europe. Like Sarfatti, Wolf enjoyed a front-row seat for an explosion of New Age activities. A high school friend and freelance writer got him interested in Uri Geller. When the friend learned that Wolf was heading off for Europe, he urged Wolf to seek out other notables of the New Age scene. Wolf obliged. Immediately upon arriving in Paris in January 1974, for example, Wolf looked up Carlo Suarès—painter, philosopher, and master of the ancient tradition of Kabbalah, or Jewish mystical numerology. Sarfatti joined Wolf for some of these chats with Suarès, and in no time Sarfatti began urging John Wheeler to contact Suarès himself because of the similarity of Wheeler’s and Suarès’s ideas about the structure of the universe.38 A few months later, back in London, Wolf attended the “May Lectures,” featuring presentations by New Age gurus like Andrija Puharich (of Uri Geller–studies fame) and Werner Erhard (the human-potential magnate). During his presentation at the May Lectures, Erhard announced that he wanted to meet physicists—he had been fascinated with the subject since boyhood, and he believed that physicists’ rigorous training could offer insights beyond quantum theory. Wolf introduced himself to Erhard at intermission and was invited to a speakers-only workshop the next day.39 Overnight, Wolf’s circle of interlocutors widened considerably. When the time came to return to the States at the end of his sabbatical, Wolf reached California by way of Puharich’s personal-residence-turned-psychic-laboratory in upstate New York. He spent several weeks there, attempting, on Puharich’s request, to relate Puharich’s psychic discoveries to Wolf’s research in quantum physics. Wolf eventually admitted defeat—“I can’t say that I discovered anything that would lend credence to their abilities,” he later wrote—but only after undergoing his own out-of-body experience and enjoying stimulating discussion with Puharich and his followers. Along with Sarfatti, Wolf, too, was hooked.40

  While Sarfatti and Wolf broadened their horizons in Europe, other physicists who would soon form the Fundamental Fysiks Group followed a complementary line of inquiry in Berkeley. Like Sarfatti, Nick Herbert and Saul-Paul Sirag were captivated by Wigner’s suggestion about the central role of consciousness in quantum measurement. They turned Wigner’s proposal on its head, asking what quantum theory implied about the nature of consciousness. Herbert had noticed a string of recent papers by a fellow physicist, Evan Harris Walker, in which Walker had begun to construct a theoretical model of consciousness. Walker, who had written a dissertation at the University of Maryland in 1964 on plasma physics and the behavior of charged bodies in motion, had made his career at the Ballistic Research Laboratories of the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Like Harold Puthoff (founder of the Stanford Research Institute psi lab), however, Walker began to find more time on his hands as defense spending on research waned. He began toying with Bohm’s hidden variables during his off hours.41

  Walker postulated that consciousness might be an infinite set of hidden variables, real but beyond direct physical observation. Like the hidden variables in Bohm’s original model, these “c-variables,” as Walker dubbed them, would determine the measured outcomes of quantum processes. And then he began to calculate. Quantum processes in the brain, such as electron tunneling across synaptic gaps between nerve endings, seemed to establish three distinct rates of data processing: subconscious (at a trillion bits per second); conscious (100 million bits per second); and “will” or volition (10,000 bits per second). This last, Walker suggested, could serve as a “data channel” for psi effects. According to quantum mechanics, all kinds of events could transpire, some with high probability and others with vanishingly low probability. Walker hypothesized that an individual might be able to consciously select an otherwise low-probability outcome, and use his or her will to arrange the c-variables so as to produce that outcome. After all, Bohm had introduced hidden variables into quantum theory precisely to replace probabilistic descriptions with definite, causal mechanisms. Walker’s hypothetical process would involve no transfer of energy, he clarified, only information. Thus a psychic could in principle violate the second law of thermodynamics—creating a more-organized state out of a less-organized one—but not the conservation of energy. Moreover, thanks to Bell’s theorem and long-distance entanglement, the low-probability event could take place miles away from the volitional brain that had willed it into being.42

  Several of Walker’s papers appeared in the Journal for the Study of Consciousness, which served as the house organ of Arthur Young’s Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, the meeting place and watering hole where several members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group frequently crossed paths. Herbert and Sirag were thus among Walker’s earliest readers and devoted fans. Herbert was so impressed that he made dozens of photocopies of Walker’s early articles to hand out to friends. (He was still working his day job at the copy machine company Smith-Corona Marchant, so he could make photocopies rather easily.) Sirag featured Walker’s work in some of his freelance articles, and defended it from skeptical critics, including hidden-variables maven David Bohm. Undeterred, Sirag shot back: one of the most attractive features of Walker’s model was that “just those things that are peculiar about quantum mechanics remind us of those things that are peculiar about consciousness, especially as exemplified in psi phenomena.” Psi and were made for each other, and, as far as Sirag was concerned, Walker’s unified theory illuminated both aspects equally.43

  Herbert and Sirag had the opportunity to tell Walker in person how much they admired his work when he came to give a talk to the Fundamental Fysiks Group in the mid-1970s. By that time they had explored Walker’s work from a number of angles, well beyond mere pencil and paper. Most playful, no doubt, was the bizarre contraption that Herbert dreamed up with a colleague who worked at the Xerox PARC research laboratory, which he dubbed the “metaphase typewriter.” Sirag, in a thinly veiled fictional account of what happened next—Nick Herbert became “Manny Hilbert”—explained that the metaphase typewriter had begun “as a joke, a tongue-in-cheek way of challenging the farfetched but intriguing theory of Harris Walker that consciousness functions as a set of Hidden Variables in a quantum mechanical system.” Herbert reasoned that if Walker were correct, then the mind might be at root a quantum effect, separate from the physical body. Mind could control the body by consciously adjusting the c-variables to shift the underlying probabilities for various events. Moreover, if mind were separate from body, this subtle biasing of quantum probabilities might be accomplished either by flesh-and-blood people sitting next to you in a room, or by any free-floating mindlike esse
nces: “spirits of the dead, beings from other dimensions, or dissociated fragments of living personalities.” With the metaphase typewriter, even these ethereal quantum-mind-spirits could have their say.44

  Herbert’s device, forged from the latest that quantum theory and digital computing had to offer, was a 1970s gadget for an 1870s dream. Like the Victorian-era spirit mediums, Herbert sought to make contact with the other side—“the realm of mind, or spirit, or subquantum level, take your pick,” as Sirag put it—and convey messages by convoluted alphabetic code: the table knockings and wall rappings of old replaced by radioactive sources and fancy electronics. Herbert assembled his apparatus in a cramped, out-of-the-way computer room nestled deep within the Medical Center at the University of California, San Francisco. A friend from Herbert’s graduate-school days at Stanford had since joined the Medical Center staff, and he snuck Herbert and company into the facilities. In the computer room, Herbert had stashed a sample of the radioactive element thallium, first identified a century earlier by renowned chemist and outspoken spiritualist Sir William Crookes.45

  Although not as stringent as today’s safeguards, by the mid-1970s several barriers stood between would-be experimenters and radioactive materials like thallium. Herbert had to file a formal petition with the Department of Public Health of the State of California; just a few years earlier, authorities in the United States had banned the use of thallium in rat poison and pesticides precisely because of public health concerns. Rather than raise eyebrows among bureaucrats by describing his contraption in detail, Herbert wrote on his application merely that the radioactive thallium would serve as a “source of random pulses for statistical analysis.”46 He grew more expansive in an unpublished technical report on his contraption that same year. “It is probably no coincidence that thallium, our licensed source, is sandwiched in the periodic table of the elements between two of the traditional alchemical metals, mercury and lead.” No wonder Crookes’s element was so effective at producing “quantum anagrams” from the spirit world.47