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

by Kaiser, David

  Along with the radioactive thallium, Herbert had rigged up a Geiger counter and a fast-printing teletype machine. (It seems that Herbert could never fully escape his day job.) He loaded his own program onto the room-sized computer to convert time delays between radioactive decays into printed letters on the teletype. Radioactive decays are a prototypical quantum-mechanical phenomenon. Individual decay events—such as when this or that nucleus will decay—can never be predicted with certainty. Nuclei of a given type have an average rate at which they decay, related to the element’s half-life; but individual nuclei from a large sample of a radioactive substance will decay at random times, scattered around the average value. Herbert zeroed in on that randomness. His device measured time delays between successive radioactive decays, and converted those time intervals to letters of the alphabet. If the gap between two radioactive decays was close to the average rate for thallium, then his metaphase typewriter would spit out a letter that appeared frequently in ordinary written English, such as e or t. If the time delay between successive radioactive decays departed further from the average rate, then Herbert’s machine would produce less likely letters, such as j or x. Ever a stickler for accuracy, Herbert had obtained the statistics for English-language letter frequencies from an unclassified report by the National Security Agency.48

  If ordinary quantum theory ruled the subatomic world, then the output from Herbert’s machine should have been pure nonsense: a random jumble of letters spewed out in a row. But if Evan Harris Walker’s musings were on track, and someone’s (or something’s) consciousness could skew the probabilities for radioactive decay—nudging individual events toward or away from an otherwise likely value—then that mind could control the sequence of letters tapped out by Herbert’s teletype. Following along Walker’s train of thought, Herbert reasoned that some conscious entity might be able to speak to the group by way of Herbert’s machine. “A rather suspect communication channel you might think,” teased Sirag in his article. “But then you haven’t encountered the strange mind of Manny Hilbert.”49

  Herbert and company tried out the device several times. First they invited a series of self-proclaimed psychics to join them, asking the guests to use their conscious willpower to spell out a list of target words on the teletype. If consciousness consisted of Walker’s hidden variables, Herbert contended, then the psychics might be able to use their minds to prod less-likely events into fruition (say, a longer-than-expected delay between radioactive decays), or pause likely events in their tracks. Proof would come from the string of letters rat-tat-tatted out on the teletype machine. Other times the group conducted séances around the machine, trying to make contact with recently departed colleagues who had known about the research before they died.50

  The climax came in March 1974, when Herbert, Sirag, and about a dozen friends held a day-long séance to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of Harry Houdini’s birth. They relished the irony: the famed magician had been an outspoken skeptic and debunker of spiritualism in his day. Yet Houdini, being the ultimate escape artist, had promised friends and family before he died that if there were any way to come back and communicate, he would. Now was his chance. In Sirag’s fictional account, the metaphase typewriter whirred into action, spitting out the string of letters “anininfinitime,” close enough to a recognizable phrase—“and in infinite time”—to convince the onlookers that in their brush with Houdini, his spirit had complained that their equipment was too slow to allow effective communication. During the actual demonstration, as Sirag recalls, they did not hear from Houdini, although the string “byjung” did crop up unexpectedly—just as a laboratory technician passed the room with a copy of The Portable Jung tucked into her pocket. Jungian synchronicity at its best. After the inevitable paper jams, celebratory drinking, and psychedelic drug use, the party disbanded. No hard conclusions to the mysteries of quantum mechanics, perhaps, but a good time was had by all.51

  When Fundamental Fysiks Group cofounder George Weissmann arrived in Berkeley to study physics in 1971, he was, by his own lights, “a complete materialist.” He had no truck with those who chased woolly spirits or pored over works by Eastern mystics. All that changed abruptly in 1974 when his father died, and George had what he can only describe as a “mystical experience” lasting several days. Looking back, he cites that event as the “awakening” he had needed. He wandered in and out of various Berkeley discussion groups, and worked his way through books like Time, Space, and Knowledge, a study of Tibetan thought by an American religous scholar. He delved more deeply into Buddhism, and he returned to books he had read as a teenager, including the writings of controversial French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Writing during the early decades of the twentieth century, Teilhard pursued a notion of teleological evolution: all matter evolved in a goal-directed way toward greater and greater complexity. Consciousness emerged at critical stages of this complexification: it inhered in one form or another in seemingly inanimate objects like rocks and plants, and in higher, self-aware forms in humans. Teilhard posited a realm of shared consciousness, or “noosphere,” extending beyond the minds of isolated thinkers. Immersing himself in Buddhist texts on the one hand and Teilhard’s on the other, Weissmann recalls, made it “possible for me to think about quantum nonlocality.” All the while, Weissmann had been interested in anomalies—tiny, seemingly inexplicable phenomena that might point to some hidden layers in the laws of physics. His twin interests in mysticism and anomalies pushed him ever more quickly into the realm of parapsychology.52

  Elizabeth Rauscher, who founded the Fundamental Fysiks Group with Weissmann, had likewise caught the parapsychology bug. Like Sarfatti, her entrée into the world of psi came via the Stanford Research Institute. What had grabbed her was not the Geller studies, but a different set of experiments. One month after Uri Geller had arrived in Puthoff and Targ’s psi lab, another unusual guest had appeared: a “spook” from the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA, like other branches of the defense establishment, had begun to harbor fears of a “psi gap” vis-à-vis the Soviets, the consequences of which could prove as devastating (according to some) as the missile gap and the manpower gap. (Never mind that neither of those previous “gaps” had been real.) In July 1972, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency completed a lengthy classified report, entitled Controlled Offensive Behavior: USSR, detailing what was known about parapsychological research behind the Iron Curtain. “The Soviet Union is well aware of the benefits and applications of parapsychology research,” declared the report’s opening summary. “Many scientists, US and Soviet, feel that parapsychology can be harnessed to create conditions where one can alter or manipulate the minds of others. The major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetics, and bionics are said to come from the Soviet military and the KGB.” And they were already off to a strong start: “Today, it is reported that the USSR has twenty or more centers for the study of parapsychological phenomena, with an annual budget estimated at 21 million dollars.” With such a robust institutional base, the conclusion seemed inescapable: “Soviet knowledge in this field is superior to that of the US.” Might the Soviet military and KGB be leaping ahead with new breakthroughs in telepathy, mind control, and psychokinesis?53

  The CIA operative approached Puthoff to try to close the psi gap. Puthoff’s prior experience in Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency, combined with his new psi lab at the Stanford Research Institute, made him an obvious target for CIA largesse. The agent hammered out an initial contract with Puthoff and Targ, and by October 1972 the first installment of $50,000 was in hand ($260,000 in 2010 dollars). Additional seed money came from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), thanks in no small part to the urging of astronaut-telepathist Edgar Mitchell.54

  With the infusion of cash, Puthoff and Targ rapidly expanded a side project that had been running alongside their Geller studies. The l
aser physicists had been working with several seers, some of whom had claimed prior psychic abilities and others who had not. The SRI scientists’ goal was to investigate whether one person could receive telepathic messages or visual stimuli from another person, even if the “sending” person were far away from the “receiver.” They dubbed the phenomenon “remote viewing.”

  A colleague at the Stanford Research Institute drew up a list of 100 locations in the San Francisco area, including swimming pools, children’s playgrounds, a bicycle shed, specific benches on the Stanford University campus, a toll plaza, and so on. Each target location was within thirty minutes’ driving distance from the SRI laboratory. The protocol that Puthoff and Targ reported included its share of spycraft spice: a member of the SRI upper management, “not otherwise associated with the experiment,” drew up the secret list of target locations. He printed the name and address of each location on a separate card. Each card was then sealed in an envelope, each envelope assigned a number, and the whole stash locked in the division director’s office safe. When the time came to conduct a remote-viewing test, the division director used a random-number generator to select a particular envelope from the pile in his safe. An outbound “target demarcation team” received the card from the division director, hopped in a car, and drove off to the specified location. Once they arrived at the site, their job was to stare intently at the specific object or location for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, back in the laboratory, a test subject and an experimenter—neither of whom had any knowledge of the set of target locations, let alone the particular location toward which the outbound team was speeding—would wait for thirty minutes (to allow for the outbound team’s travel time). Then the remote-viewing subject would begin to describe into a tape recorder any images or impressions that came to mind; the subject could also draw pictures. The experimenter who remained at the lab with the remote-viewing subject would ask questions to prompt further description or ask for clarifications. The subject’s verbal descriptions were then transcribed, and the transcripts and drawings given to a panel of judges, along with a stack of photographs of the target locations that had been visited. The question became whether the judges would discern any statistically significant matches between the target locations and the stream-of-consciousness descriptions produced by the remote-viewing subjects.55

  Puthoff and Targ reported some astounding results. After nine remote-viewing subjects had completed a total of fifty-one experiments, judges matched viewers’ descriptions to photographs of the target locations at well above chance levels. In some cases, the odds appeared to be one in a million that the associations could have occurred merely by random chance.56 The laser physicists managed to publish their findings in top-ranked scientific journals. They used appropriately scientific language to describe their results: “Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding,” for example, as they titled their 1974 article in the journal Nature; or “A perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances” in their long 1976 article in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.57 Journalists who caught a whiff of the research peppered their reports with juicier language, such as “mystic powers” and “supernatural phenomena.” “If a man walked up to you on the street and told you that you had amazing mental powers that would enable you without using any equipment whatever to see through walls and watch things happening miles away,” began one long article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “you would probably give him the fishy eye and walk away as quickly as possible”—and yet (the report continued) that was precisely what Puthoff and Targ seemed to be able to replicate in their laboratory at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute.58

  Only decades later, after many of the early contracts and technical reports from the SRI remote-viewing work were declassified in the 1990s, did a fuller picture begin to emerge. The documents revealed an expensive and long-lived program, clandestinely funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, and related national-security bureaus, to develop what some advocates jokingly called “ESPionage”: the use of extrasensory perception (ESP) to peer into secret military establishments within the Soviet Union and elsewhere.59

  Long before the national-security impetus behind remote viewing came out into the open, Elizabeth Rauscher had been fascinated by the local press reports on Puthoff and Targ’s work. The SRI work seemed to herald new breakthroughs in the nonlocal nature of human perception. Rauscher decided she had to learn more about it. The headstrong self-starter, who used to gate-crash her way into the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as a high school student, decided there was no need to wait for an invitation to visit the SRI psi lab. She just showed up on Puthoff and Targ’s doorstep one day. They tried to give her the brush-off until she showed them a long manuscript she had been working on, concerning theoretical efforts to explain nonlocality.60

  Rauscher had been dabbling in relativity and cosmology since her return to graduate school. An autodidact in those fields, she got in touch with Princeton physicist and relativity specialist John Wheeler—the selfsame Wheeler of “participatory universe” fame with whom Jack Sarfatti was also enjoying an active correspondence at the time. Wheeler made frequent trips to NASA’s Ames Research Center near San Francisco, and Rauscher often met with him while he was in town. They continued their discussions via letter, and he encouraged her forays into relativity and cosmology.61 She had published a few short papers on obscure relativistic models and had begun to write a long monograph on the subject when she first heard about the Puthoff-Targ work on remote viewing.62

  In the course of her work, Rauscher realized that one way to account for nonlocal effects—perhaps even to explain Bell’s theorem, at a deeper level—would be to increase the number of dimensions of space and time. She began toying with a model in which the familiar coordinates of space and time were made complex: instead of a single dimension of time, for example, there would be two, a real component and an imaginary component. A similar doubling of the three dimensions of space (height, breadth, and depth) led to an eight-dimensional space-time rather than Einstein’s four-dimensional version. The expanded space-time would contain new sets of shortest paths between here and there. What might look like a far spatial distance within a four-dimensional world might in fact have no space-time distance within the enlarged eight-dimensional universe. A long duration of time, as viewed within the four-dimensional slice, might take no time at all when viewed within the larger multidimensional system.63

  When Rauscher got to those last features of her model, Puthoff and Targ stopped trying to shoo her out the door. For some time, they had been grasping for deep physical explanations that might account for their puzzling experimental results. They had routinely ended their early reports on remote viewing with a gesture toward Bell’s theorem and quantum nonlocality, but they had not pursued the connection any further.64 What they really needed was a house theorist—a consultant, expert in theoretical physics, who could work alongside them and focus on establishing some first-principles explanation, based on the laws of physics, that might explain the mysterious remote viewing phenomenon. Rauscher fit the bill. Her model explained, or at least could take into account, why their remote viewers seemed able to receive signals, instantaneously, across great distances; why the strength of those signals did not seem to fall off with distance; and even why some viewers seemed to receive signals from the future (“precognition”). Almost immediately, Puthoff and Targ arranged for Rauscher to serve as a paid consultant to their psi lab at the Stanford Research Institute. The extra consulting fees no doubt came in handy for the young mother trying to make ends meet on a graduate-student stipend.65 (Fig. 4.6.)

  Rauscher began her consulting work at the psi lab one year before she and Weissmann started the Fundamental Fysiks Group. By the time the Berkeley discussion group began she had participated in, or closely observed, dozens of remote-viewing experiments. In her mind, the
experimental data on remote viewing seemed at least as statistically solid and repeatable as the one-in-a-million “golden events” that particle physicists chased with their huge accelerators. Even with her healthy dose of skepticism about the paranormal, she reasoned that “any subject (even if it doesn’t exist) is a science, if the methodology of science is used to study it.”66 And so, as the first order of business for the Fundamental Fysiks Group, Rauscher, Sarfatti, Sirag, and Weissmann set out to replicate the Stanford Research Institute remote-viewing experiments. They dedicated all of June and July 1975 to the new experiments. In the end, they failed to find any statistically significant results, as they reported at that summer’s annual meeting of the Parapsychology Association: independent judges only managed to match viewers’ descriptions and sketches with photos of the target locations at chance levels. But they did find intriguing correlations all the same. One viewer produced surprisingly detailed descriptions of different targets, shifted from the intended target by a day or so. Perhaps, Rauscher and company suggested, this viewer had received precognitive visions of where the outbound observer would be going for the next session. All ample material that the Fundamental Fysiks Group pursued in follow-up sessions throughout the next year, including presentations by Puthoff and Targ themselves.67