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

by Kaiser, David

  FIGURE 5.2. Nude couples on the balcony at the Esalen Institute, 1970. (Photograph by Arthur Schatz, reproduced by permission of Getty Images.)

  Esalen director Michael Murphy was so pleased with the month-long physics experiment that the workshops became a fixture. He invited Herbert and Sirag to organize a five-day version of the original workshop, focused on “Bell’s theorem and the nature of reality.” They obliged, and quickly set about planning the event. They shared their thoughts with Berkeley physicist and Fundamental Fysiks Group member Henry Stapp, who warned them (as Herbert recorded) that physicists might too easily slip into the “more comfortable territory of mathematical formalism, the fine details of proofs and experiments, rather than grapple with the difficult and unfamiliar task of constructing new realities consistent with Bell’s discovery.” “Stapp was exhorting us,” Herbert concluded, “to shun the fleshpots of Egypt and to go forth and build new dwellings in the wilderness.” That was precisely what Herbert and Sirag set out to do. Their first goal was to pare down the various derivations of Bell’s theorem to their most basic form, removing extraneous assumptions. As Herbert noted, that task was made easier by the extensive analyses that had already been hashed out during Fundamental Fysiks Group discussions. “Could we extend this botany of possibilities at Esalen?” he wondered.45

  Of course, as Stapp had warned them, Herbert, Sirag and their Esalen interlocutors did not have an easy time of it. Categorizing each others’ candidates for the ultimate nature of reality was no simple matter. “Epithets” were “hurled at certain theories and theory-makers” during one “particularly disputatious session,” which took on appropriately cosmic contours. “The weather seemed to track our moods,” Herbert reported: “storm and heavy rain at the beginning (roads slide-blocked, power out at Esalen), later sparkling sunny with hundreds of lofting Monarch butterflies mocking physicists’ airy notions of what can and cannot be beneath the ever-present world of phenomena.” And so they went, hammering at the questions of Bell’s theorem, nonlocality, and the nature of consciousness during their intense workshop.46 Again Murphy was pleased, and Herbert’s and Sirag’s workshops became an annual event, meeting virtually every year until 1988—making them the longest-running seminar series in Esalen’s history. In addition to Herbert and Sirag, John Clauser, Henry Stapp, and David Finkelstein became regulars, presenting their latest research each year on quantum nonlocality and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. (Fig. 5.3.) Fritjof Capra organized related workshops at Esalen on parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism.47 Even Caltech’s Richard Feynman got into the act. Though he had turned down Sarfatti’s invitation to the original workshop in 1976, he reversed course and hosted his own (competing) Esalen workshop a few years later. The appeal of spending more time at Esalen—he had long admired the beautiful scenes along the rocky coast as well as in the naked co-ed hot-spring baths—seems to have trumped his allergy against dabbling with philosophical questions. Feynman’s 1983 workshop, entitled “The quantum mechanical view of reality,” featured in-depth discussions of Bell’s theorem and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, interspersed “with sessions of primitive drum playing, yoga exercises, etc.”48

  The human-potential mavens Werner Erhard and Michael Murphy catalyzed further fund-raising efforts. The PCRG, for example, which Erhard had helped to get off the ground, announced soon afterward that it was raising funds to support John Clauser’s next-generation nonlocality experiments. Securing such funding was no small matter: at just that time, a young physicist at Texas A&M, having become interested in Bell’s theorem from Clauser, was hitting a brick wall in his efforts to get National Science Foundation support for his own version of Clauser’s experiments. Repeatedly turned down from the usual funding sources, the Texas physicist, too, had to seek private support.49 Meanwhile, Murphy and Nick Herbert convinced a wealthy participant in the Esalen workshops—Charles Brandon, one of the founders of shipping company Federal Express—to help support emerging research in the area. Brandon obliged, underwriting something they called “The Reality Foundation Prize.” The first recipients were John Clauser and John Bell, who split the $6000 award money in 1982 (more than $13,000 in 2010 dollars). Bell was wary—he wrote to Clauser to inquire whether this was a “quack” group or not—and despite Clauser’s reassurances, he declined to attend the award ceremony at Esalen. Herbert wrote to congratulate Bell on the award, assuring him that the champagne toasts drunk in Bell’s honor had made the event “merry,” but not undignified. To this day, meanwhile, Clauser’s fancy plaque commemorating the Reality Foundation Prize hangs in his office at home.50

  FIGURE 5.3. Participants in the Esalen workshops on “Bell’s theorem and the nature of reality,” early 1980s. Left: Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp lectures on quantum nonlocality in Esalen’s “big house.” Middle: Georgia Tech physicist David Finkelstein explains his latest work on quantum logic to Esalen’s codirector Michael Murphy. Right: Esalen’s Michael Murphy ponders quantum reality. (Courtesy Nick Herbert.)

  Though Bell turned them down, the curious little workshops at Esalen did attract other figures from Europe. The German physicist Dieter Zeh made his way from Heidelberg to Esalen for an intense meeting in 1983, for example, finding the Big Sur collective one of the few places in which he could discuss his ideas about the quantum measurement problem in sufficient detail. The group had discussed his work during previous workshops, so they were primed to dig into details with Zeh once he was able to join them. Nearly a decade passed before his “decoherence” interpretation of quantum measurement—now undeniably at the forefront of research—began to attract significant attention beyond the Esalen crowd.51

  The French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat also seemed to take to the place. His 1971 book, Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, had focused squarely on Bell’s theorem and entanglement; he had also organized two influential summer workshops on the topic in Europe.52 Yet he, too, felt the draw of Esalen, and accepted Nick Herbert’s and Saul-Paul Sirag’s invitation to participate in 1982. D’Espagnat’s travel itinerary en route to Esalen illustrates how porous the boundaries between margin and mainstream could be. He piggybacked a short visit to John Wheeler’s group on top of his trip to Esalen, asking Wheeler’s secretary to coordinate directly with Sirag at Esalen to make all necessary arrangements.53 On their way from Esalen to retrieve d’Espagnat from the local airport, Sirag and Herbert picked up a waterlogged hitchhiker, who had gotten doused in a big storm. Upon climbing into the backseat of their car, he announced that he was an armed robber, recently released from prison, who was making his way north to find food, clothes, and shelter. At the airport, d’Espagnat traded places with the hitchhiker in the car for the return trip. When Herbert and Sirag told them about their recent adventure, d’Espagnat replied (without missing a beat), “Who do you think is more dangerous—an armed robber or a theoretical physicist?” Once safely ensconced at Esalen, d’Espagnat quickly fell into a routine. He held “office hours” in the famous hot tubs: only once he and his interlocutors were reclining, naked, in the hot-spring baths would he discuss Bell’s theorem and quantum nonlocality.54

  Backed by money from unusual sources—most especially self-made millionaires and fixtures of California’s New Age scene—the Berkeley physicists’ Fundamental Fysiks Group, Physics/Consciousness Research Group, Consciousness Theory Group, and Esalen workshops became the only shows in town for puzzling through the implications of Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement. Berkeley’s Henry Stapp closed a lengthy article on “Locality and reality” in 1980 by acknowledging the Esalen workshops for providing a space for him to work out his emerging ideas on entanglement and nonlocality. John Clauser, meanwhile—no fan of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s turn to parapsychology—exclaimed in a single breath in a recent interview that “those guys were a bunch of nuts, really,” but that the group’s “open discussion forum” was the only setting in which physicists could talk about the latest devel
opments in quantum nonlocality. Clauser could likewise dismiss the annual Esalen workshops—“they would offer courses for mostly wealthy Los Angelinos and Bay Area folks who wanted to have their consciousness expanded”—and yet he rarely turned down an invitation to come speak about his latest work, year in and year out for the better part of a decade.55 At a time when the vast majority of physicists still ignored or shunned the subtle business of how to make sense of quantum theory and its broader implications, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group carved out flourishing, alternative spaces to keep the quest alive.

  Chapter 6

  Spreading (and Selling) the Word

  Packaging ideas as commodities, to be pushed in the same manner that other commodities are, lessens the impact they can make over time—unless that impact depends in part on scale of exposure or on linking specialists who are isolated by conventional disciplinary boundaries. In such cases, the market mode’s capacity for promoting symbols as fad items may facilitate the process of new paradigm formation…. A few of the counter-culture physicists have attempted a similar breakthrough of communication.

  —Max Heirich, 1976

  Gathering around Esalen’s hot tubs to discuss Bell’s theorem was one thing. The “new physicists” faced the challenge of how to spread the fruits of their research beyond the Bay Area. At the time, physicists still could not hash out this material in the regular American physics journals. The longtime editor of the Physical Review—the mainstream workhorse of a journal, covering all topics in physics—actually banned articles on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. He went so far as to draw up a special instruction sheet to be mailed to referees of potentially offending submissions: referees were to reject all submissions on interpretive matters out of hand, unless the papers derived quantitative predictions for new experiments. As Fundamental Fysiks Group member and entanglement experimentalist John Clauser has pointed out, Bohr’s famous response to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, back in 1935, would hardly have qualified for publication under those strictures. Well into the 1970s, these policies shunted papers into unusual venues. Many went to the Italian journal Nuovo Cimento, which had adopted a more welcoming stance toward interpretive material. Others went to Foundations of Physics, the new journal founded in 1970 by two philosophically oriented émigré physicists working in the United States.1

  Some of the most important papers, however, circulated by far more fragile means. Many appeared in a hand-typed, mimeographed newsletter, Epistemological Letters, including cutting-edge articles by John Bell himself. Epistemological Letters was produced by a private foundation in Switzerland and sent out to anyone who asked to be put on its mailing list.2 Other papers circulated in crude photocopy form thanks to a larger-than-life character named Ira Einhorn.

  Einhorn emerged as a darling of the New Left in the late 1960s. He led huge antiwar protests, hung out with famous Yippies like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and had a hand in some of the early environ-mentalist mass events, including the first Earth Day rally in 1970. While most of the high-profile hippies and radicals made their homes in San Francisco or New York City, Einhorn settled in his native Philadelphia. He became a local celebrity, the city’s main conduit to the New Age. His ebullient intellectual energy charmed people from across Philadelphia’s broad spectrum. College professors welcomed him and students flocked to him—especially to his freewheeling extension-school courses on psychedelic drugs. The city’s down-and-out looked up to him as a community organizer who could get things done.

  By the early 1970s, Einhorn had transformed himself into a freelance literary agent with an appetite for discussions about physics, consciousness, and the paranormal. He became one of Uri Geller’s earliest promoters and served as a one-man distribution center for the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s latest ideas. He also channeled several of them into the popular book market. Thanks to Einhorn’s innovative networking, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group performed an end-run around physicists’ usual communication outlets. They managed to spread their message far and wide for the better part of a decade, until Einhorn’s network came to a sudden and ignominious end.

  Ira Einhorn grew up in Philadelphia, the oldest child in a proud, middle-class Jewish family. At the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, he fell in love with the study of physics; he took physics courses his whole first year of college, intending to major in the subject. During his sophomore year, however, he came under the spell of a particularly inspiring mentor and his focus shifted to literature. Not long after Einhorn completed his undergraduate degree in 1961, that same mentor urged Einhorn to enroll in Penn’s PhD program in literature. The professor had to twist some colleagues’ arms to get Einhorn accepted, given Einhorn’s spotty undergraduate record: Einhorn had a habit of failing to show up to classes that no longer held his interest. The professor prevailed and Einhorn began his graduate studies, only to drop out a year or two later. He read avidly on his own—he later boasted that he read a book a day, every day—but he had little patience for what he considered the staid, tweedy routines of academic life.3

  One of the books that Einhorn encountered around that time was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. Kuhn’s book would become a classic, easily one of the most influential books of the second half of the twentieth century. By the early 1980s Kuhn’s book was the single most-cited book in all of the arts and humanities, eclipsing works by Freud, Chomsky, Derrida, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and, indeed, everyone else. One bemused observer noted that in the late 1970s, Harvard students were assigned Kuhn’s book an average of two and a half times over their undergraduate careers: everyone from historians and sociologists to physicists, economists, and political scientists assigned the book in their classes.4

  That runaway success lay far in the future when Einhorn discovered Kuhn’s book. He became enamored of Kuhn’s argument about the rise and fall of scientific worldviews. Einhorn was especially captivated by Kuhn’s argument about anomalies: stubborn findings that fail to fit within prevailing scientific theories. Some of Kuhn’s favorite examples included the accidental discovery of X-rays in 1895, and the unexpected detection of nuclear fission in a Berlin laboratory late in 1938. In both cases, the experimental data that would later be recognized as robust signals of major new phenomena had seemed, upon scientists’ first encounter with them, to be little more than hiccups, minor deviations from the expected results that would presumably be assimilated or cleaned up down the road. Kuhn argued that when the collection of anomalies grows to a critical mass—when all those tiny blips and departures from expectations accumulate, and no accommodation with the reigning theory seems possible—they prompt a sudden “paradigm shift,” reordering all our basic assumptions about how the world works.5

  Einhorn was so taken with Kuhn’s scheme that early in 1964 he put pen to paper and wrote to Kuhn directly. “Thank you for writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Einhorn’s letter began. “Its power and elegance somewhat reaffirm my already deteriorating faith in the ability of the academic world, as it is presently structured, to produce works of lasting significance in the humanities. A book such as yours makes one realize that there are still a few bright lights burning in the wasteland of modern humanistic thought.” The recent graduate-school dropout—Einhorn was still a few months shy of his twenty-fourth birthday—went on to list a dozen further references ranging across art history, philosophy, psychology, and beyond, that Kuhn might wish to consult to help sharpen his thinking on the matter.6

  This first exchange reveals several of Einhorn’s enduring characteristics: no small amount of confidence in his own thinking; great passion for ideas about science and how today’s scientific orthodoxy can become tomorrow’s discarded paradigm; and a familiarity—with references and citations at his fingertips—with interesting ideas across a broad spectrum of subjects and disciplines. And there was more: Einhorn’s abiding faith that people with common int
erests should communicate directly and informally. Just like the “Republic of Letters” during the Enlightenment, Einhorn believed that the postal service could knit together a network of like-minded thinkers.

  Kuhn’s response to the four-page, handwritten letter is equally striking. By the time he received Einhorn’s letter, Structure—his second book—had been out for two years. He was a full professor at Berkeley, having completed his doctoral and postdoctoral training at Harvard. “I probably need not tell you how much delight your good letter of January 16th has given me,” Kuhn began, “but I do want to thank you for taking the trouble to write it. It is by all odds the most perceptive response I have yet received to my book, and it has helped my morale immeasurably.” Kuhn thanked Einhorn for the many references, even asking for more information about an essay Einhorn had mentioned by Nelson Goodman, a renowned philosopher whose work would often, in later years, be compared with Kuhn’s. And Kuhn agreed with Einhorn that Kuhn’s protean notion of “paradigm,” as introduced in Structure, still required “all sorts of additional work.”7 Ever perceptive, young Einhorn had put his finger on a major sticking point. A few years later a scholar isolated twenty-two distinct ways in which Kuhn used the term “paradigm” throughout The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: sometimes Kuhn used the term to denote a concept or theory, other times to denote a social structure such as a discipline or community, and still other times he seemed to use it to denote a method or laboratory practice. Kuhn endeavored to rectify the embarrassing conceptual muddle in later editions.8