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

by Kaiser, David

  Kuhn closed his letter to Einhorn by noting that he would soon be taking up a professorship at Princeton. With Einhorn living in nearby Philadelphia, Kuhn hoped they could arrange to meet in person. And so began a most curious relationship. Kuhn and Einhorn carried on a spirited correspondence for several years, interspersed with frequent personal visits. Sometimes Kuhn took the train to Philadelphia; other times Einhorn met him at his Princeton office and shared meals at his home. Kuhn dutifully sent drafts of his latest essays to Einhorn, who responded with detailed comments.9 Kuhn was so impressed with the budding intellectual, in fact, that he recommended Einhorn for a prestigious fellowship in Harvard’s Society of Fellows—the selfsame fellowship on which Kuhn had first begun working on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions a few years earlier.10 (Despite Kuhn’s letter, Einhorn did not secure the fellowship.) They traded ideas back and forth with ease. “Sorry to throw off half developed ideas this way,” Einhorn wrote near the end of one of his letters, “but they are on my mind, and they might ring a bell in your mind. If not disregard them. Publication should be precise, conversation and letter writing a mess—how else can we learn?”11 That notion—the unencumbered, free-spirited sharing of ideas by letter before they became ossified in print—would become an organizing principle of Einhorn’s activities.

  Kuhn agreed with Einhorn about the importance of informal correspondence, and their letters quickly reflected a growing camaraderie. “Professor Kuhn” became “Tom,” “Mr. Einhorn” simply “Ira.” At one point after Einhorn’s peripatetic wanderings had kept him from writing to Kuhn for a few months, Kuhn greeted the next missive with cheer. “I had been wondering what you were up to and am correspondingly delighted to have your note. By all means let us get together,” Kuhn enthused. “I do look forward to catching up on your activities.” The feeling was mutual. Within days Einhorn replied to set up another meeting, emphasizing that “your enthusiasm is such a delight to experience.”12

  By that time, late in 1966, Einhorn had many activities on which to report for Kuhn. After dropping out of graduate school, Einhorn taught English for a while as a part-time instructor at Philadelphia’s Temple University. Tiring of that—he still found academic life “sterile”—he began making frequent trips to California. The Esalen Institute in Big Sur became a home away from home. He plugged into the flowering counterculture movements there, experiencing firsthand the still-coagulating youth movement: equal parts antiwar protest, psychedelic drugs, Eastern mysticism, and communal living. He carried that jumble of experiences back with him to Philadelphia, along with a fast-growing network of tuned-in friends.13

  In no time Einhorn had established himself as the “leading guru of Philadelphia’s hippie community,” as Philadelphia Magazine christened him in 1967.14 He began teaching in a brand-new experimental program organized by the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society. Dubbed “Free University,” and loosely affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, the student-run alternative granted neither grades nor diplomas. Instructors volunteered to teach classes on any topic that interested them, and lessons continued as long as people showed up. Free U mixed the highbrow with the practical: courses on Nietzsche and esoteric literature were listed alongside workshops on how to avoid the draft, a pressing concern as the Vietnam War began to escalate. From the start, however, the most popular course was entitled simply “Evenings with Ira Einhorn.” Drawing seventy students week after week, Einhorn used the course to ruminate on fast-paced societal changes. He gave updates on budding hippie communities from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district to Cambridge’s Harvard Square.15 He developed other courses for the Free University—likewise wildly popular—on psychedelic drugs and on “The World of Marshall McLuhan,” whose theories about pop media and communication were just beginning to percolate. (Einhorn enjoyed quoting McLuhan’s aphorisms, such as “Today’s mysticism is tomorrow’s science.”) Einhorn sent his McLuhan syllabus to Kuhn, suggesting that McLuhan’s work, though “wacky,” might “cast oblique light” on Kuhn’s own research topics. Organizers of Free University gave Einhorn’s McLuhan course the pet name “Intro to Hippiedom.”16

  Building on his stand-out performances at Free U, Einhorn solidified his position as Philadelphia’s head hippie. He became a kind of pied piper for the city’s disenchanted youth. “Have rallied the kids in the drug scene around me,” he reported at one point to Kuhn, “slowly trying to direct their energies to more constructive endeavors.”17 His course on psychedelics, which grew to include about 100 people per session, spawned other events around town. He organized a symposium on LSD at Temple University that drew 350 people, and he began to appear with increasing frequency on local radio and television programs to talk about the city’s “psychedelic scene.”18

  In January 1967, the nation sat riveted before television coverage of the first “Be-In,” held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The day-long media spectacle aimed to unite the ardent New Left political protesters of Berkeley with the free-love and free-drug hippies of Haight-Ashbury. Einhorn recognized a good idea when he saw one, and he set about organizing Philadelphia’s own Be-In. Having carefully secured all the necessary permits in advance, Einhorn’s Be-In, held in a large city park that April, drew nearly 2000 people.19 A local reporter marveled that Einhorn—“Philadelphia’s best known social dropout”—always “manages to show up wherever there is trouble and has been credited with helping cool at least one potential riot situation at the University of Pennyslvania.” Put simply, “He is the town Guru.”20

  A guru needs a fitting moniker. Since “Einhorn” means “one horn” in German, Einhorn began calling himself “the Unicorn.” By the late 1960s the self-styled Unicorn had begun to mingle with the likes of Richard Alpert, the former Harvard psychology professor whose exploits with psychedelic drugs (including experiments on undergraduates) had cost him his job, along with that of his collaborator, Timothy Leary. When leading lights of the counterculture passed through Philadelphia, from Yippie antiwar protesters Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to poet Allen Ginsberg and composer John Cage, Einhorn served as their quasi-official host.21 All the while he maintained contact with his “straight” interlocutors. “You sound even busier than I,” replied Kuhn after one of Einhorn’s updates. Other professors in the area, such as the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came to know Einhorn as a “friendly and gracious host.” Dyson developed great respect for Einhorn’s courage in leading the antiwar protests.22

  Einhorn’s uncanny ability to interact with people from all lifestyles and persuasions came in handy early in 1970. Other groups had begun to plan big events for April 22, which they dubbed “Earth Day.” They hoped that a mass gathering, modeled on the antiwar rallies and campus teach-ins, would help focus attention on environmental and ecological issues. The organizers of the Philadelphia event sought out Einhorn to land his counterculture constituency. They brokered a deal: Einhorn would help with arrangements in exchange for serving as master of ceremonies at the big event. When television crews swarmed to Philadelphia’s Earth Day rally—one of the nation’s largest, attracting tens of thousands of people to the same city park in which Einhorn had earlier hosted his Be-In—Einhorn dominated the media coverage. (Fig. 6.1.) One month later, Philadelphia Magazine devoted a feature-length article to the local celebrity on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday. Riding high, Einhorn mounted a semiserious campaign for mayor the following year.23

  FIGURE 6.1. Ira Einhorn addressing the first Earth Day rally in Philadelphia, April 1970. (Courtesy Temple University Archives.)

  By that time, Einhorn’s interests had broadened even beyond psychedelics or the budding environmental movement. His experiences with LSD and other drugs had heightened his curiosity about human consciousness. Einhorn read Andrija Puharich’s Beyond Telepathy (1962) cover to cover; he considered it a must-read guide to the field. Puharich, originally trained as a medical doctor, ha
d become an avid inventor of medical devices, holding dozens of patents for items like improved hearing aids. He had also devoted years of study to psychedelics, faith healing, and parapsychology, some of the work rumored to have been under the auspices of the CIA.24 When a mutual friend offered to introduce Einhorn to Puharich in 1968, Einhorn leaped at the chance. They met at Puharich’s parapsychology laboratory and personal residence in Ossining, New York, not far from New York City. They hit it off immediately and stayed in contact. Einhorn began making frequent visits to Ossining.25

  Soon after they met, Puharich discovered Uri Geller, at the time still performing his mind-reading and spoon-bending feats in Tel Aviv nightclubs. Puharich whisked Geller to the United States, and Einhorn worked closely with Puharich behind the scenes to promote the scientific study of Geller’s unusual abilities. Here, Einhorn was convinced, were crucial anomalies of just the sort Kuhn had described: psychic happenings and unexplained leaps of consciousness that just might topple the reigning paradigms of physics and psychology.26

  Preparations for Earth Day brought Einhorn into contact with several of Philadelphia’s leading businesspeople. An executive at General Electric, who served on the Earth Day planning committee, introduced Einhorn to a colleague, a vice president at the Pennsylvania branch of Bell Telephone. As with Kuhn before him, Einhorn and the Bell executive formed a fast friendship. Occasional lunches quickly blossomed into weekly dinners with Einhorn, the executive, and his wife at their suburban home.27

  Einhorn proved his value to Bell Telephone soon enough. When the company planned to build a large switching station in a run-down neighborhood of South Philadelphia, and the locals pushed back against the corporate incursion into their territory, Einhorn’s dining companion sought advice. The Unicorn stepped in and brokered a deal. After that, several high-level Bell executives, including the president of Pennsylvania Bell, began seeking out Einhorn’s advice for how to improve community relations. As one of the executives explained, they turned to Ira for “help and counsel on what we might be doing wrong in various parts of the Philadelphia community.”28 For years, the Bell executives treated Einhorn as a highly prized management consultant, long before that role had become commonplace. Rarely would Einhorn’s focus turn to this or that detail of corporate governance. Instead, he spun for his eager listeners a grander picture, a vision of an emerging networked society built around a new communitarian ethos. Einhorn cobbled together his message from his Esalen encounters, widespread reading, and interactions with like-minded thinkers such as Stewart Brand, who had just begun articulating a similar concept in his ragtag Whole Earth Catalog. The telephone executives couldn’t get enough. Alongside the college kids and the acid freaks, the Bell executives treated Einhorn as a guru, their personal ambassador to the New Age. Soon the long-haired, potbellied, graduate-school dropout became a regular lunch companion to executive vice presidents, dining at one of Philadelphia’s posh restaurants.29

  Einhorn refused payment for these consultations. In lieu of cash, his Bell contacts paid him with services rendered. One of the first items Einhorn bartered was to get the Pennsylvania Bell leadership to pressure their colleagues at the world-famous corporate laboratory—Bell Labs, in nearby New Jersey—to study Uri Geller’s psychic powers. The lab’s scientists grudgingly agreed. Geller was ushered in under a thick cloak of secrecy; part of the deal was that no one would publicize the lab’s involvement.30 Though Geller managed to surprise some of the scientists and engineers with his abilities, little came of the 1972 meeting. Soon after that, Puharich landed Geller in the much more receptive psi lab at the Stanford Research Institute. Though the Bell Labs visit was a bust, Einhorn’s close friend—the Bell Telephone vice president—gained much from the encounter. Along with Einhorn, the telephone executive began hanging out with Puharich and finding himself invited to parties with Geller.31

  Beyond the Geller visit, Einhorn’s friends at Bell Telephone provided a much more important service. The Unicorn’s corporate contacts agreed to assume all costs and operations for his grand experiment in networking. Every few weeks, Einhorn sent a thick stack of papers to one of his associates at the telephone company—a smorgasbord of formal preprints, hastily typed press releases, clippings from newspapers and magazines, and informal musings of all kinds—along with a distribution list. The Bell executives would do the rest, making sure that the materials were photocopied and mailed out to whomever Einhorn had designated for a given package. With the corporate giant’s help, Einhorn built just the sort of large-scale circulation system for informal ideas that he had envisioned in his early correspondence with Kuhn. He created, in effect, one of the first “listservs,” or, as it later came to be known, “an internet before the internet,” powered by photocopy machines, mimeographs, and postage stamps.32

  Einhorn tended to his network with extraordinary care. Not just anything would go out. He handpicked the items and personally tailored the distribution list for each package, always striving to maximize the intellectual impact of particular ideas on targeted thinkers. Before long, his handlers at Bell had a collection of index cards with more than 300 names and addresses from which Einhorn would select recipients for a given mailing. The packages, featuring Bell’s corporate logo on each envelope, traveled far and wide; by 1978 the list included recipients in more than twenty countries across North America, Western Europe, and even the Soviet bloc.33 Einhorn, who proudly referred to himself as a “planetary enzyme,” catalyzing intellectual reactions across the globe, cultivated a contact list that soon included everyone from famed anthropologist Margaret Mead to novelist and parapsychology enthusiast Arthur Koestler, futurist Alvin Toffler, inventor Arthur Young (founder of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, at which members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group often crossed paths), and more. Business tycoons appeared on the rolls next to peace activists; heirs to billion-dollar fortunes alongside leading lights in the Esalen human-potential movement.34 A British economist extolled Einhorn’s network in the pages of Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly in 1979. The unusual network “circulates papers mutually between some of the most brilliant and original minds on the planet,” she wrote. It had become “one of my best sources of epistomological [sic] speculation for the past ten years, even though I can not, for obvious reasons, suggest how to access or make inputs to it.” “It was a wonderful arrangement,” crowed Einhorn’s original contact at Bell Telephone. “Ira had an absolutely incredible circle of friends.”35

  Not all recipients were equally appreciative. Several, like leading physicists Freeman Dyson and John Wheeler, never asked to be put on the mailing list in the first place. Dyson recalls sweeping nearly every package directly into the trash bin. “I found Einhorn interesting as a person but not as a scientist,” he recently clarified.36 The high-tech Diebold Corporation, on the other hand, took a rather different view. They commissioned an internal study of Einhorn’s network in 1978 and invited Einhorn to corporate headquarters in New York for a follow-up discussion. The Diebold executives wondered whether networks like Einhorn’s could help “sensitize” corporate management to “emerging social demands.” Einhorn’s great experiment in connectivity, and the ideas that flowed so freely within it, could acclimatize CEOs and upper management with “a better feeling” for “the mood of the time in which we live.” By (in effect) eavesdropping on the latest developments “in a non-threatening environment,” managers could anticipate the next big social and political rifts: a kind of early warning system before activists with bullhorns began shouting the same ideas across a picket line. Einhorn’s network could even help the bottom line by fostering niche marketing.37

  The latest ruminations by Fundamental Fysiks Group members Jack Sarfatti, Fred Alan Wolf, Elizabeth Rauscher, and Nick Herbert often topped Einhorn’s lists. A journalist who was on the mailing list wrote about Einhorn’s network late in 1976. He titled his article “Notes from the far-out physics underground” and highlighted recent work
from the Fundamental Fysiks Group on the physics of psi as typical fare for the Unicorn’s mailings. Sarfatti’s original press releases about the laboratory tests of Uri Geller in London likewise circulated thanks to Einhorn’s network.38

  One item by Sarfatti and Wolf that Einhorn mailed out bore the straightforward-sounding title “A Dirac equation description of a quantized Kerr space-time”—from the sound of it, just the sort of material one might expect to read in a mainstream physics journal like the Physical Review. In case the title failed to tip off readers, someone added the helpful handwritten cue: “see pp. 4 and 5 on ‘psi’ effect.” Thanks to the Unicorn preprint service, Sarfatti’s and Wolf’s latest brainwave went out to everyone from Uri Geller’s main handler, Andrija Puharich, to physics-and-consciousness theorists Evan Harris Walker and Charles Musès, retired Air Force colonel and parapsychology advocate Tom Bearden, Columbia University physics department chair Gerald Feinberg, Princeton physicists Freeman Dyson and John Wheeler, and Einhorn’s old friend “Tom” Kuhn.39 (Fig. 6.2.)