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

by Kaiser, David

  FIGURE 4.6. Elizabeth Rauscher’s multidimensional approach to nonlocality and remote viewing. In this example, a subject sitting at the origin (x = 0 and t = 0) can receive signals instanteously from the “target event,” separated in space from where she is sitting, if those signals travel through the imaginary-time dimension,. (Illustration by Alex Wellerstein, based on Rauscher [1979], 60.)

  Chapter 5

  New Patrons, New Forums

  The purpose of the PCRG [Physics/Consciousness Research Group] is to foster philosophical inquiry in quantum physics for the increased well-being of modern civilization’s people, animals, and plants. PCRG recognizes that knowledge, in the form of critical inquiry, pursued in a context of love, is a path to spiritual wisdom. The ideal style of PCRG is Plato’s Academy in Hellenic Athens rather than the Hellenistic Scholarship of the Great Library of Alexandria that rules the modern University.

  —Jack Sarfatti, 1977

  Like any intrepid explorers, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group needed more than just passion to achieve their goals. They needed dependable base camps from which to mount their intellectual expeditions. Most of all, they needed cash. Given their mix of interests and the state of academe, hobbled by budget cuts and job losses, the young physicists needed to look beyond the usual physics institutions. They needed to carve out their own niche, a parallel universe with many of the trappings of the academic world but few of the constraints. With entrepreneurial flair, members of the group secured financial backing from some unusual patrons. Alongside CIA handlers and Pentagon officials, self-made millionaires with a hankering for quantum weirdness stepped in and kept the group afloat. With funds in hand the physicists forged new forums, safe spaces in which they could explore everything from the hidden byways of quantum theory to the nature of consciousness and the mysteries of the paranormal.

  Jack Sarfatti’s exuberant press releases about the Uri Geller tests, and the broader media coverage that members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group had begun to attract, invited some concerted pushback. Harold Puthoff, Russell Targ, and their psi lab at the Stanford Research Institute—whose tests of Uri Geller’s psychic abilities and other paranormal phenomena such as remote viewing had captivated several members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group—did not suffer from any lack of spirited debunkers. Experimental psychologists, rather than other physicists, were quickest to jump into the fray. Some questioned the degree to which judges in the SRI remote-viewing experiments could have been swayed, consciously or unconsciously, by textual clues about the intended targets left in the transcripts. Others went after fine points of method, such as whether it was legitimate not to replace targets in the pool after one had been selected at random, thus steadily reducing the pool of potential targets with each viewing session. Such discussions trickled out with reasonable decorum, point-counterpoint, in major scientific journals such as Nature.1

  Not everyone was content with the kid-gloves approach. Some came out swinging, comparing Puthoff’s and Targ’s research to Lysenko’s decimation of Soviet genetics research after World War II; both, these critics argued, threatened to edge out legitimate science. Magician and parapsychology watchdog James “The Amazing” Randi—who had demonstrated to Jack Sarfatti how old-fashioned magic tricks could replicate many of Uri Geller’s remarkable feats—took a more humorous approach. He dedicated an entire chapter of his popular book on “delusions” to the SRI psi lab’s exploits, calling Puthoff and Targ “the Laurel and Hardy of psi.” Thirty pages detailed what Randi considered to be Puthoff’s and Targ’s crimes against scientific method, statistical reasoning, and common sense.2

  Physicist John Wheeler, whose ideas and correspondence had so inspired Sarfatti, Elizabeth Rauscher, and the others, likewise threw down the gauntlet. Wheeler prepared a talk for the January 1979 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to clarify why he thought his interpretation of quantum mechanics had been misappropriated in the parapsychological realm. To his dismay, he showed up at the meeting only to discover that his talk was scheduled in a session on science and consciousness alongside Harold Puthoff! Wheeler went on the warpath. First he appealed to the AAAS leadership to revoke the membership that had been granted, back in 1969, to the Parapsychological Association. The time had come, Wheeler charged, to “drive the pseudos out of the workshop of science.” Then he trained his sights more narrowly upon Sarfatti, Rauscher, and company. Wheeler closed his AAAS lecture by admonishing, “Let no one use the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment to claim that information can be transmitted faster than light, or to postulate any so-called ‘quantum-interconnectedness’ between separate consciousnesses. Both are baseless. Both are mysticism. Both are moonshine.” He elaborated in a long article in the New York Review of Books, “Quantum theory and quack theory,” coauthored with longtime popular science writer Martin Gardner. (Jack Sarfatti latched onto Wheeler’s charge of “moonshine,” gleefully repeating to anyone who would listen that before the Manhattan Project, the great nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford had famously rejected nuclear fission as “moonshine.”)3

  More than just editorialize, critics such as Randi, Gardner, and Wheeler began to organize. They formed groups like CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and ASTOP (the Austin Society to Oppose Pseudoscience; Wheeler having moved from Princeton to the University of Texas at Austin). Labeled a “scientific-vigilante organization” by some sociologists at the time, CSICOP attacked what its members considered New Age excesses. They conducted replication studies, founded a journal (the Skeptical Inquirer), and issued their own press releases, at times blurring the line between seemingly objective scientific body and self-interested lobbying group.4

  And yet, as we now know, the joke was ultimately on the debunkers. Despite the thoroughgoing criticism and the overheated rhetoric, research on remote viewing continued unabated for more than twenty years, paid for with more than $20 million of taxpayer money (in 2010 dollars). The initial exploratory grant of $50,000 from the CIA, back in October 1972, snowballed over the years, with frequent inputs from the Defense Intelligence Agency and other branches of the Pentagon. While Wheeler pleaded with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to bar research like Puthoff and Targ’s, the budget for their psi lab at the Stanford Research Institute swelled to nearly $1 million per year (about $3 million per year in 2010 dollars). Top-secret spin-offs sprang up around the country, usually established with Puthoff’s help. No number of failed replications seemed to quell their backers’ interest. When researchers at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland conducted their own pilot study in 1978–79—having dished out $100,000 in consulting fees to Puthoff’s SRI lab to get them going—they found no statistically significant results. But just like Rauscher and the Fundamental Fysiks Group members, the investigators at Aberdeen (including Evan Harris Walker, of consciousness-hidden-variables fame) had found enough surprising gems in the transcripts to keep at it. “The evaluation process is truly an art,” concluded the secret Aberdeen report. “Our replication of the [SRI] protocol did not result in statistical significance,” the report conceded, but “we learned a great deal about ourselves.” And so the cash kept flowing.5

  Puthoff and Targ thus managed to ride the Sputnik-era patronage machine into the New Age. Even after the Cold War bubble had burst, they still derived the bulk of their funds from defense-oriented agencies in the federal government—albeit agencies different from the ones that had funded most basic research in physics until then. Others became even more creative in their search for funds. They cultivated relationships with a different type of patron: eccentric enthusiasts with burning questions and money to spare. Here again members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group hearkened back to an earlier way of doing physics. Much like their quest to bring philosophy and big-thoughts speculation back into physicists’ daily routines, their fund-raising efforts more closely resembled patterns from the 1920s and
1930s than from the Cold War years. During those earlier times, nearly all funding for physics research had come from private donors, philanthropical foundations, and local industries rather than from the federal government.6 The hippie physicists thought it might be time to give that older funding model another try.

  First to help out was Arthur Young, whose Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley helped to bring Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, and Elizabeth Rauscher together. Young, a Princeton-educated engineer, had spent much of the 1930s and 1940s tinkering with ideas (and filing patents) for what would become the first commercially licensed helicopter. Jarred by the atomic bombings at the end of World War II—and financially secure thanks to his new helicopter design, which first took to the air in 1946—Young backed away from engineering and turned squarely to his other passions from undergraduate days: philosophy, Jungian psychoanalysis, and Eastern spirituality. By the time he opened his Berkeley institute in the summer of 1973, his intellectual journey had brought him squarely back to the mysteries of modern physics, some of which he had first dabbled with at Princeton. As he argued around that time, science could “best serve mankind and regenerate its search for truth” by merging the insights of quantum theory with “recent work in psychology, and perhaps ESP”; Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle promised insights into the human condition, with its constant negotiation between “freedom and necessity.”7 He began to host outside speakers at the institute every Thursday night. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ from the Stanford Research Institute became regulars, as did Berkeley physicist and Fundamental Fysiks Group charter member Henry Stapp. They were joined by philosophy professors and an eccentric computer scientist from a neighboring university. As the institute’s live-in research assistant, Sirag began hosting a complementary discussion group, each Tuesday night, focused more specifically on physics and consciousness. They called themselves the “Consciousness Theory Group.” Backed by Young’s generous resources, the new group flourished. As Nick Herbert put it recently, Young’s institute served as a “wonderful intellectual salon and sanctuary for the pursuit of the unusual, the extraordinary, and the marvelous.”8

  Within a few years, however, Sirag began to feel restless. Arthur Young seemed less inclined to entertain theories of physics and consciousness that deviated from his own. As it happened, a new wealthy patron appeared just in time: the toy manufacturer and paranormal enthusiast Henry Dakin. Dakin invited Sirag (who was dating Dakin’s secretary at the time) to move into a house that Dakin owned across the street from his office in downtown San Francisco, and to continue the Consciousness Theory Group from there. In addition to Sirag, Herbert, and Rauscher, the group attracted experts in computer programming, visualizations of brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG), a biophysicist experimenting on the “psychic healing of bacteria,” and more. One member had access to anatomy laboratories on Berkeley’s campus and shuttled the group in after hours to examine dissected brains. Another, Charles MacDermid, an early pioneer in electronic music, spiced group meetings with his “weird vibrations,” as Herbert put it. Backed now by Dakin’s largesse—a place to hold meetings, and some extra cash to invite outside speakers such as hidden-variables theorists David Bohm and Evan Harris Walker—the Consciousness Theory Group aimed at nothing short of cracking the mystery of consciousness. And they were confident: they had a diverse mix of talents and they would stop at nothing in their quest. As Herbert explained, “We would take any drug (some of us), compose bizarre music, use EEG output in unusual ways, consort with psychics, Tarot [card] readers, tricksters, shamans, sex magicians and millionaire toy manufacturers (Henry Dakin).” Between Young’s patronage and Dakin’s, the group met twice a month for more than three years.9

  Werner Erhard also became a generous patron. Fred Alan Wolf had met Erhard in London in May 1974, when Erhard asked if any physicists were in attendance during his May Lectures presentation; Wolf obliged during the intermission and was invited into the inner sanctum. The next month, back in Paris, Wolf brought Sarfatti to meet Erhard in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel. Once Sarfatti broke the awkward silence by insulting Erhard—using, as it happens, a slogan associated with Erhard’s self-help program—he and Wolf were in.10

  Werner Erhard (born Jack Rosenberg) had undergone a remarkable transformation just a few years earlier. Abandoning his wife, four children, and car-salesman job in Philadelphia, Rosenberg took off with a mistress (whom he later married) to forge a new life. After adopting his new alias, Erhard worked for a while in the encyclopedia business, quickly rising to managerial ranks. Soon he emerged as the enigmatic guru at the heart of the “human potential movement.” His est workshops (“Erhard Seminars Training”), founded in 1971, had brought in nearly $3.4 million ($15 million in 2010 dollars) by the time he met with Wolf and Sarfatti just three years later. The group could already count at least a dozen “Sphere of Influence People” among its graduates, as internal est memos referred to them: famous entertainers (John Denver, Diana Ross, Valerie Harper, Roy Scheider, Cloris Leachman), astronauts (Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin), political advisors (Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean), university presidents (Oberlin’s Robert Fuller), Olympic athletes (skier Suzy Chaffee), and more. Far beyond this elite group, the est workshops garnered mass appeal. Within a few years, Erhard’s organization could claim more than half a million graduates throughout the United States, each of whom had plunked down $250 for an intensive two-weekend, sixty-hour group-therapy session in a hotel ballroom.11

  These days Erhard avers that est was distinct from the human potential movement, though journalists routinely categorized it as such at the time. As Erhard sees it, est was “a lot more rigorous in its thinking” than most of what passed for “human potential” back then. “It was a logical unfolding that brought people to insights that they found valuable in supporting themselves regarding the quality of their life, and their effectiveness in life.”12 Erhard and est quickly developed a vast and loyal following. Yet beginning in the mid-1970s, some critics began to allege that the methods employed in est sessions were “excessively confrontational.” Three psychiatrists, one of whom had undergone the est training, cautioned in the pages of the American Journal of Psychiatry that est trainers “employ a confrontational, authoritarian model and often respond to disagreement from the participants with intimidation and ridicule.” It was reported that est trainers sometimes taunted and insulted participants in their effort to goad people into “getting it,” Erhard’s favorite phrase for a process by which someone could reevaluate deeply held beliefs and reassert control over his or her life.13 Newsweek magazine reported Erhard’s reaction to the latest critiques: “Erhard regards the report [in the American Journal of Psychiatry] as yet another failed attempt to find fault with his patented system of self-help. ‘They’ve tried to dress est in other costumes like brainwashing and Fascism,’ he says. ‘Now it’s psychosis-inducing. It’s a legitimate process we have to go through, but none of the costumes fit.’”14 Criticisms continued to swirl alongside glowing testimonials from some who had passed through the est training. All the while the rolls of est graduates continued to swell.15

  Wolf and Sarfatti stumbled into Erhard’s orbit with remarkably good timing. Ever since boyhood, Erhard had been fascinated by science, and by physics in particular. He had sought out popular treatments of physics during high school, intrigued by what he considered the “counterintuitive” features of modern physics. He kept wondering, “How did these people come up with that kind of an insight?” Years later, when he needed to adopt a new first name for his alias, he chose “Werner” after the fabled quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg.16 With his newfound wealth, Erhard aspired to become a major benefactor for cutting-edge research. Just a year before meeting Wolf and Sarfatti, he had undertaken massive renovations to his San Francisco mansion, known as “Franklin House,” which doubled as his living quarters and est headquarters. Throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at the project, he aimed
at nothing less than to establish it as “San Francisco’s most dazzling salon.” An investigative journalist—no fan of Erhard or est—concluded that “With a formal education that ended in high school, Erhard was determined to overcome his own intellectual shortcomings by surrounding himself with those whose very presence in his home would help to confirm his reputation as an enlightened source of big ideas.”17

  Once they were back in California from their European forays, Sarfatti and Wolf, joined by Saul-Paul Sirag, began working with Erhard’s est trainers, coaching them on the new physics of Bell’s theorem and nonlocality. Soon the consultants had a place of their own, when Erhard provided start-up funds for the physicists to establish the Physics/Consciousness Research Group, or PCRG. Sarfatti filed articles of incorporation with the state of California to establish the PCRG as a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation. President and treasurer, Jack Sarfatti; vice president, Saul-Paul Sirag. As the corporate filing stipulated, “The specific and primary purposes of this corporation are to support new research, to publish scientific work, and to educate the general public on fundamental studies concerning the nature of consciousness in its relation to the laws of physics.”18 Erhard’s charitable foundation donated about $5000 to help the group get started (more than $20,000 in 2010 dollars). With additional cash from a wealthy UFO enthusiast, the PCRG set up shop on two floors of an office building in San Francisco’s tony Nob Hill neighborhood.19

  Soon after the group’s founding, Sirag explained that their goal was to “communicate the excitement and adventure of modern theoretical physics to the people in imaginative forms of communication.” He was no stranger to those “imaginative forms of communication.” The previous year he had composed a science-fiction opera, in which a physicist invents a means of time travel and confronts several paradoxes of causality and faster-than-light communication. (Charles MacDermid, the electronic music aficionado and Consciousness Theory Group member, composed the score.) Sirag was fishing around for some genuine physics notions to shore up his plot when he stumbled upon Sarfatti’s forthcoming paper in Psychoenergetic Systems on quantum theory and Uri Geller’s psychic powers, which Jack had written while on his European sabbatical. “Jack’s paper appeared synchronistically,” Sirag concluded, and he pasted some lines from it directly into the libretto.20 Once they teamed up and began running the PCRG, they continued in a similar vein. They held public seminars on the new physics and composed ersatz curricular materials. One was Sarfatti’s “Time Traveller’s Handbook,” a fictional prose-style account of themes similar to Sirag’s opera, intended to educate and entertain. After all, Sarfatti proclaimed in the handbook, “Scientific speculation is exciting and a turn on.” The handbook bristled with pop-culture allusions. Sarfatti couched his explanation of space-time diagrams of relativity, for example, in the language of Baba Ram Dass’s 1971 best-seller, Be Here Now. (Born Richard Alpert, Ram Dass had taught psychology at Harvard alongside Timothy Leary until both were dismissed for experimenting on undergraduates with psychedelic drugs.) Sarfatti enlisted the Beatles’ song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” to clarify his distinction between classical and quantum physics. Physicist and quantum pioneer Max Born’s description of instant, acausal quantum jumps came paired with Werner Erhard’s own aphorism that “The only thing there is is instant enlightenment. It happens out of time, so it is really instantaneous.”21