by David Kaiser
15. Caltech Bone Book entries: Michael Cohen, 14 May 1953, in box 1, vol. 7; Frederick Zachariasen, 27 May 1953, in box 1, vol. 7; and Kenneth Kellerman, 10 April 1961, in box 1, vol. 9. Copies of the written comprehensive and qualifying exams may be found in LIS box 9, folder “Misc. problems”; in FB box 10, folder 19; in box 3, folder 4, University of California–Berkeley, Department of Physics records, collection number CU-68, Bancroft Library; and in Kelly, “Survey of Education,” appendix 19.
16. Raymond T. Birge to E. W. Strong, 30 August 1950 (“disgrace”), in RTB. See also David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 18–19.
17. Jacques Cattell, ed., American Men of Science, 10th ed. (Tempe, AZ: Jacques Cattell Press, 1960), s.v. “Nordheim, Dr. L(othar) W(olfgang).” See also William Laurence, “Teller Indicates Reds Gain on Bomb,” New York Times, 4 July 1954; and John A. Wheeler with Kenneth Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 202–4.
18. Paul F. Zweifel’s handwritten notes on Nordheim’s 1950 course at Duke University are available in the Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics; see pp. 8–11, 38–39, 58.
19. Freeman Dyson’s handwritten lecture notes from his courses at Cornell (1952) and Princeton (1961), in Professor Dyson’s possession, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Enrico Fermi, Notes on Quantum Mechanics (1961), 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), which reproduces the mimeographed handwritten lecture notes that Fermi distributed to his class at the University of Chicago (1954); Elisha Huggins’s handwritten notes on Richard Feynman’s course at Caltech (1955), in Professor Huggins’s possession, Dartmouth College; Hans Bethe’s handwritten lecture notes from Cornell (1957), in HAB box 1, folder 26; Evelyn Fox Keller’s handwritten notes on Wendell Furry’s course at Harvard (1957), in Professor Keller’s possession, MIT; Saul Epstein, “Lecture Notes in Quantum Mechanics” (1958), mimeographed typed lecture notes, available in the University of Nebraska Physics Library, Lincoln; and Edward L. Hill, “Lecture Notes on Quantum Mechanics” (1958), mimeographed typed lecture notes, available in the University of Minnesota Physics Library, Minneapolis. For each course, I was able to estimate enrollments based on PhD conferrals from those departments four and five years later (taking into account average degree-completion times from that era). In those cases for which archival information about actual enrollments remains available, the estimates based on later PhD conferrals matched actual enrollments: Julia Gardner (reference librarian, University of Chicago), email to the author, 16 September 2005; Bethe’s course grade sheet available in HAB box 1, folder 26; Roger D. Kirby (chair, Department of Physics, University of Nebraska), email to the author, 15 September 2005; and Mary N. Morley (registrar, Caltech), email to the author, 13 September 2005.
20. Leonard I. Schiff, Quantum Mechanics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), xi; and David Bohm, Quantum Theory (New York: Prentice Hall, 1951), v.
21. Schiff’s handwritten lecture notes from fall 1959, in LIS box 8, folder “Sr. Colloquium ‘Relativity and Uncertainty’” (emphasis in original).
22. See reviews of various editions of Schiff’s textbook: Weisskopf, “Quantum Mechanics”; Morton Hammermesh, “Quantum Mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 17 (November 1949): 453–54; Abraham Klein, “Quantum Mechanics,” Physics Today 23 (May 1970): 70–71; and John Gardner, “Quantum Mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 41 (1973): 599–600.
23. E. M. Corson, “Quantum Theory,” Physics Today 5 (February 1952): 23–24 (“rare example”).
24. Corson, “Quantum Theory,” 23–24 (“concise and well balanced”); and Inglis, “Quantum Theory,” 522–23 (“credit of Bohm’s book”).
25. On Bohm’s case, see esp. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 135–37, 142–44; F. David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), chaps. 5–8; Russell Olwell, “Physical Isolation and Marginalization in Physics: David Bohm’s Cold War Exile,” Isis 90 (1999): 738–56; Olival Freire, “Science and Exile: David Bohm, the Cold War, and a New Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 36 (2005): 1–34; and Shawn Mullet, “Little Man: Four Junior Physicists and the Red Scare Experience” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008), chap. 4. On sales of Schiff’s book, see Malcolm Johnson to Leonard Schiff, 11 March 1964, in LIS box 9, folder “Schiff: Quantum mechanics.” In 1989, Dover Publications issued a reprint of Bohm’s 1951 textbook. On Bohm’s failed efforts to publish a follow-up textbook, see the correspondence in LIS box 13, folder “Bohm.”
26. Edward Gerjuoy, “Quantum Mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 24 (February 1956): 118.
27. Eyvind Wichmann, “Comments on Quantum Mechanics, by L. I. Schiff (Second Edition),” n.d. (ca. January 1965), in LIS box 9, folder “Schiff: Quantum mechanics” (emphasis in original).
28. Jacques Romain, “Introduction to Quantum Mechanics,” Physics Today 13 (April 1960): 62 (“avoids philosophical discussion”); D. L. Falkoff, “Principles of Quantum Mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 20 (October 1952): 460–61 (“philosophically tainted questions”); and Herman Feshbach, “Clear and Perspicuous,” Science 136 (11 May 1962): 514 (“musty atavistic to-do”).
29. George Uhlenbeck, “Quantum Theory,” Science 140 (24 May 1963): 886. Statistics on textbook publications come from keyword and call-number searches in the online catalog of the US Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov. With the aid of several research assistants, I copied every homework problem within this set of textbooks and coded each by whether the problem required students to perform a calculation or to describe a physical effect in short-answer or essay form.
30. Robert Eisberg and Robert Resnick, Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles (New York: Wiley, 1974), vi, 25, 245, 322; Michael A. Morrison, Thomas L. Estle, and Neal F. Lane, Quantum States of Atoms, Molecules, and Solids (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), xv; Robert Eisberg, email to the author, 7 October 2005; and Robert Resnick, email to the author, 11 October 2005. Enrollment changes calculated from data in the annual American Institute of Physics graduate-student surveys, 1961–75, available in American Institute of Physics, Education and Manpower Division records, collection number AR15, Niels Bohr Library. One may find a similar shift in the types of homework problems included in textbooks on quantum mechanics aimed at undergraduates. Compare, e.g., A. P. French, Principles of Modern Physics (New York: Wiley, 1958), with A. P. French and Edwin F. Taylor, An Introduction to Quantum Physics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Moreover, one finds that textbooks written by physicists in other countries fit the same pattern regarding correlations between pedagogical style and enrollments. Textbooks on quantum mechanics after the Second World War by authors in the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, which each experienced surges in physics enrollments, included only a small proportion of discussion-style homework problems until the enrollments fell. Physicists in other European countries, such as France, West Germany, and Austria—which did not experience a large spike in physics enrollments after the war—continued to publish textbooks similar to the interwar models, with lengthy chapters on philosophical interpretations of the quantum-mechanical formalism.
31. Raymond T. Birge to E. B. Roessler, 29 November 1952 (“subjects that are not trivial”); Birge to K. T. Bainbridge, 11 February 1953 (“not the sort of work”); and Birge to Alfred Kelleher, 3 November 1954, all in RTB. On the other promotion case, see Birge to Dean A. R. Davis, 9 April 1951, in RTB.
32. On incoming graduate-student enrollments in Stanford’s physics department, see faculty meeting minutes, 12 January 1970, in FB box 12, folder 1; and unsigned memo, “Graduate Enrollment and Projection,” 2 February 1972, in FB box 12, folder 8. On fears of becoming a “factory,” see Paul Kirkpatrick, memo to Stanford ph
ysics department faculty, 19 January 1956, in FB box 10, folder 2; and Ed Jaynes, memo to department faculty, 27 April 1956, in FB box 10, folder 3. See also the anonymous memos on comprehensive exam results, 7 and 14 April 1956, in FB box 10, folder 3 (“Rather limited knowledge”); 2 February 1958, in FB box 10, folder 8; W. E. Meyerhof, minutes of Graduate Study Committee meeting, 4 November 1959, in FB box 10, folder 12; and Felix Bloch, “Oral Examinations” memorandum, 9 May 1961, in FB box 10, folder 16.
33. “Faculty Skit 1963,” available in University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Department of Physics, Faculty Skits, 1963–73, deposited in the Niels Bohr Library.
34. A. L. Fetter memo to department faculty, 28 February 1972, in FB box 12, folder 8; and comprehensive exam (21–22 September 1972) in FB box 12, folder 10. On the new seminar, see W. E. Meyerhof, memo to Stanford’s physics graduate students, 29 September 1972, in FB box 12, folder 10.
35. On Feynman’s “Physics X” course, see James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 398–99.
36. Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics, 19–20.
Chapter 9
Versions of this essay appeared in David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), chap. 7; and in Isis 103 (2012): 126–38.
1. See also David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, eds., Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
2. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1975).
3. Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 22–25. The Santa Cruz physicist who invited Capra was Michael Nauenberg; see Nauenberg interview with Randall Jarrell, 12 July 1994, on 37. Transcript available at http://physics.ucsc.edu/~michael/oral2.pdf.
4. Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, 23 (“schizophrenic life”), 27 (on Alan Watts). On Watts’s connections with Esalen, see Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 59, 73, 76, 99, 121–25.
5. Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, 34. Capra opened The Tao of Physics (11) by recounting his “Dance of Shiva” experience on the beach.
6. Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, 34.
7. Fritjof Capra to Victor F. Weisskopf, 12 November 1972, in VFW box NC1, folder 26.
8. Ibid. On Weisskopf’s career, see David Kaiser, “Weisskopf, Victor Frederick,” in New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 2007), 7:262–69; and Victor F. Weisskopf, The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist (New York: Basic, 1991). The oft-stolen textbook was J. M. Blatt and V. F. Weisskopf, Theoretical Nuclear Physics (New York: John Wiley, 1952).
9. Capra to Weisskopf, 11 January 1973 (quotations), and Capra to Weisskopf, 23 March 1973, both in VFW box NC1, folder 26.
10. Weisskopf to Capra, 19 April 1973, in VFW box NC1, folder 26.
11. Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, 44–45 (“rather hard-headed”), 53–54. Capra’s early essays include Fritjof Capra, “The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics,” Main Currents in Modern Thought 29 (September–October 1972): 15–20; and Fritjof Capra, “Bootstrap and Buddhism,” American Journal of Physics 42 (January 1974): 15–19. On Chew’s bootstrap program, see David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chaps. 8–9.
12. Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, 46; and Judith Appelbaum, “Paperback Talk: A Science with Mass Appeal,” New York Times, 20 March 1983, 39–40. On Shambhala Press, see also Sam Binkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 120–22.
13. Capra to Weisskopf, 7 May 1976, and Weisskopf to Capra, 21 June 1976 (quotations), both in VFW box NC1, folder 26.
14. On sales, see Capra to Weisskopf, 8 July 1976, in VFW box NC1, folder 26; and Appelbaum, “Paperback Talk.” On subsequent editions and translations, see the full list at http://www.fritjofcapra.net (accessed 12 June 2008).
15. Several years later, two comparative-religion scholars scoffed that Capra’s book “seemed to misinterpret Asian religions and cultures on almost every page”: Andrea Grace Diem and James R. Lewis, “Imagining India: The Influence of Hinduism on the New Age Movement,” in Perspectives on the New Age, ed. James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 48–58, on 49.
16. Karen de Witt, “Quantum Theory Goes East: Western Physics Meets Yin and Yang,” Washington Post, 9 July 1977, C1 (“Tall and slim”); and Capra, Tao of Physics, quotations on 307.
17. Capra, Tao of Physics, 19, 25, 141.
18. Capra, Tao of Physics, 160 (“this notion,” coat of arms); see also 114–15 and chaps. 11–13.
19. Jack Miles, “A Whole-Earth Scientific Order for the Future,” Los Angeles Times, 4 April 1982, N8 (“amazingly well”); Jonathan Westphal, in Christopher Clarke, Frederick Parker-Rhodes, and Jonathan Westphal, “Review Discussion: The Tao of Physics by F. Capra,” Theoria to Theory 11 (1978): 287–300, on 294 (“Capra is clearly in earnest”); and Abner Shimony, “Meeting of Physics and Metaphysics,” Nature 291 (4 June 1981): 435–36, on 436. For other reviews, see George B. Kauffman, “The Tao of Physics,” Isis 68 (1977): 460–61; A. Dull, “The Tao of Physics,” Philosophy East and West 28 (1978): 387–90; D. White, “The Tao of Physics,” Contemporary Sociology 8 (1979): 586–87; Sal P. Restivo, “Parallels and Paradoxes in Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Part I: A Critical Reconnaissance,” Social Studies of Science 8 (1978): 143–81; Sal P. Restivo, “Parallels and Paradoxes in Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Part II: A Sociological Perspective on Parallelism,” Social Studies of Science 12 (1982): 37–71; and Robert K. Clifton and Marilyn G. Regehr, “Toward a Sound Perspective on Modern Physics: Capra’s Popularization of Mysticism and Theological Approaches Reexamined,” Zygon 25 (March 1990): 73–104.
20. Isaac Asimov, “Scientists and Sages,” New York Times, 27 July 1978, 19; and Jeremy Bernstein, “A Cosmic Flow,” American Scholar 48 (Winter 1978–79): 6–9.
21. Capra, Tao of Physics, 25; and V. N. Mansfield, “The Tao of Physics,” Physics Today 29 (August 1976): 56.
22. Capra to Weisskopf, 8 July 1976, in VFW box NC1, folder 26; David Harrison, “Teaching The Tao of Physics,” American Journal of Physics 47 (September 1979): 779–83, on 779 (“This leads naturally”); and Eric Scerri, “Eastern Mysticism and the Alleged Parallels with Physics,” American Journal of Physics 57 (August 1989): 687–92, on 688 (“Anyone involved”). Jack Sarfatti likewise adopted Capra’s book as a textbook for one of his popular seminars on science and religion, run by the Physics/Consciousness Research Group: Jack Sarfatti, “Physics/Consciousness Program, De Anza-Foothill College, Spring Quarter 1976,” on 4–5, in JAW, Sarfatti folders.
23. Clifton and Regehr, “Toward a Sound Perspective,” 73–74.
24. Pedagogical critiques include Donald H. Esbenshade Jr., “Relating Mystical Concepts to Those of Physics: Some Concerns,” American Journal of Physics 50 (March 1982): 224–28; and Scerri, “Eastern Mysticism.” Cf. David Harrison, “Comment on ‘Relating Mystical Concepts to Those of Physics’” (letter to the editor), American Journal of Physics 50 (October 1982): 873 (“most of these students”); and David Harrison, email to the author, 3 July 2007 (“bums in the seats”).
25. Harrison, “Comment on ‘Relating Mystical Concepts to Those of Physics,’” 873–74; David Harrison, “Bell’s Inequality and Quantum Correlations,” American Journal of Physics 50 (September 1982): 811–16; Nick Herbert, email to the author, 16 April 2008; and Harrison, email to the author, 17 April 2008. The first quantum mechanics textbook to include any material on Bell’s theorem was J. J. Sakurai, Modern Quantum Mechanics (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings, 1985), 223–32; see L. E. Ballentine, “Resou
rce Letter IQM-2: Foundations of Quantum Mechanics since the Bell Inequalities,” American Journal of Physics 55 (September 1987): 785–92, on 787.