Review by Choice Review
In the mid-1970s, a group of maverick young physicists gathered at Berkeley to discuss their ideas that were, at the time, well outside the thinking of mainstream physics. The "Fundamental Fysiks Group" was deeply involved in psychedelic drugs, Eastern mysticism, and all other aspects of the hippie culture that surrounded them. Despite all odds, the group came up with breakthrough ideas such as resurrecting the all-but-forgotten Bell's theorem to introduce the concept of quantum entanglement, and quantum encryption that is at the heart of all new information systems being developed today. With books such as F. Capra's The Tao of Physics (5th ed., 2010; 1st ed., CH, Jun'76) and G. Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), these individuals reached audiences far outside the physics community. Today the group and its members are largely forgotten; however, as Kaiser (MIT) points out, they should be credited with changing the worldview of how physics, and indeed the nature of all physical reality, should be considered. This entertaining, worthwhile read is as much about the nature of society at the dawn of the New Age as it is about quantum physics. Chapter notes and an extensive bibliography will aid serious scholars of the era. Summing Up: Recommended. Academic and general readers, all levels. C. G. Wood formerly, Eastern Maine Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
"WHAT the BLEEP Do We Know!?," a spaced-out concoction of quasi physics and neuroscience that appeared several years ago, promised moviegoers that they could hop between parallel universes and leap back and forth in time - if only they cast off their mental filters and experienced reality full blast. Interviews of scientists were crosscut with those of self-proclaimed mystics, and swooping in to explain the physics was Dr. Quantum, a cartoon superhero who joyfully demonstrated concepts like wave-particle duality, extra dimensions and quantum entanglement. Wiggling his eyebrows, the good doctor ominously asked, "Are we far enough down the rabbit hole yet?" All that was missing was Grace Slick wailing in the background with Jorma Kaukonen on guitar. Dr. Quantum was a cartoon rendition of Fred Alan Wolf, who resigned from the physics faculty at San Diego State College in the mid-1970s to become a New Age vaudevillian, combining motivational speaking, quantum weirdness and magic tricks in an act that opened several times for Timothy Leary. By then Wolf was running with the Fundamental Fysiks Group, a Bay Area collective driven by the notion that quantum mechanics, maybe with the help of a little LSD, could be harnessed to convey psychic powers. Concentrate hard enough and perhaps you really could levitate the Pentagon. In "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival," David Kaiser, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, turns to those wild days in the waning years of the Vietnam War when anything seemed possible: communal marriage, living off the land, bringing down the military with flower power. Why not faster-than-light communication, in which a message arrives before it is sent, overthrowing the tyranny of that pig, Father Time? That was the obsession of Jack Sarfatti, another member of the group. Sarfatti was Wolf's colleague and roommate in San Diego, and in a pivotal moment in Kaiser's tale they find themselves in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Paris talking to Werner Erhard, the creepy human potential movement guru, who decided to invest in their quantum ventures. Sarfatti was at least as good a salesman as he was a physicist, wooing wealthy eccentrics from his den at Caffe Trieste in the North Beach section of San Francisco. Other, overlapping efforts like the Consciousness Theory Group and the Physics/Consciousness Research Group were part of the scene, and before long Sarfatti, Wolf and their cohort were conducting annual physics and consciousness workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Fritjof Capra, who made his fortune with the countercultural classic "The Tao of Physics" (1975) was part of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, as was Nick Herbert, another dropout from the establishment who dabbled in superluminal communication and wrote his own popular book, "Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics" (1985). Gary Zukav, a roommate of Sarfatti's, cashed in with "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" (1979). I'd known about the quantum zeitgeist and read some of the books, but I was surprised to learn from Kaiser how closely all these people were entangled in the same web. Kaiser says his title was inspired by Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization," and he has a similar aim: to show, with a healthy dose of irony, how another "unlikely group of underdogs and castaways kept the torch of learning aflame." He reminds us that the pioneers of quantum mechanics - Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger - argued endlessly about the implications of their equations: particles that were somehow waves of probability, that hovered in superposition between two states, that made quantum jumps without traversing the space in between. These thinkers were often as engaged with the philosophy as they were with the mathematics. Ultimately the interpretations were only words: futile attempts to grasp something beyond language and maybe beyond mind. By the time the hippies were in school, physics textbooks had all but abandoned the messiness of meaning. Quantum physics worked. The message was "Shut up and calculate." I remember the letdown. I thought for a while that I wanted to be a physicist. I was glad to read here that philosophizing about physics has made a comeback in university classrooms. Without the enthusiasms of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, Kaiser speculates, the inquisitive spirit might never have been revived. More specifically, Kaiser argues that the hippies, with their noble failures, contributed to a cutting-edge technology called quantum cryptography. A member of the collective, John Clauser, conducted the first experiment that confirmed Bell's theorem, suggesting that two subatomic particles, once they have been in contact, will remain subtly entangled no matter how far they are separated in space. This "non-locality," the fysicists felt in their bones, would allow for instantaneous signaling. Herbert was devising what appeared to be a particularly ingenious scheme, and in the course of debunking it, Kaiser ventures, mainstream physicists came to appreciate that entanglement does allow for something else: encrypting messages so that they are impossible, in theory, to surreptitiously intercept. Maybe the hippies' unrestrained enthusiasm nudged other minds to think up quantum cryptography. But as much as I enjoyed this book, I didn't leave the party persuaded that their influence was all that great. Some of the most imaginative ideas in those days were coming from physicists like John Wheeler, who saw the universe as a "self-excited system" bootstrapped into being by conscious observers. Wheeler, as close to an antimatter hippie as can be imagined, diplomatically rebuffed the San Francisco cabal. So did his student Richard Feynman, who indulged in Esalen's hot tubs as much for hedonistic reasons as for intellectual ones. His many-paths interpretation of quantum theory, in which a particle could be thought of as simultaneously taking every conceivable avenue from A to B, including those that looped back in time, was as mind-blowing as anything hallucinated by the Fundamental Fysiks Group. While the hippies shared the wonderment of their more successful colleagues, they lacked their skepticism. Just because an equation can be parsed to show a time-traveling particle doesn't mean that We of Many Particles can pull off such a stunt. Maybe the Bay Area mavericks did serve physics in a smaller way: by helping to bring its fascination to the masses. Some good books came out of San Francisco. Capra's "Tao of Physics," read metaphorically, provides a stimulating flyover of both physics and Eastern religion. Herbert's "Quantum Reality," Kaiser tells us, is assigned in undergraduate physics courses. But a lot of what was inspired by that era was just physics porn - titillating but with no follow-through. Who the bleep needs that? The hippie physicists thought quantum mechanics, mixed with LSD, could convey psychic powers. George Johnson is the author of eight books, including "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Strange science requires stranger scientists. Behind the mystifying but potent new physics of quantum encryption, Kaiser uncovers a ragtag band of scientists, the Fundamental Fysiks Group, a bizarre but brilliant company that coalesced at Berkeley in the 1970s, hanging together long enough to dabble in psychedelic drugs, experiment with extrasensory perception, toy with Asian mysticism and launch audacious new science. These are hippie scientists who conduct electronic seances to communicate with Houdini, delving into the I Ching as a guide to quantum complementarity, and testing the telepathic powers of spoon-bending psychics. Even in funding their unlikely projects, these hippie savants defy the conventions, shrewdly leveraging their ties to New Age gurus with big checkbooks. Though Kaiser can recognize bunkum, he lauds this group for exposing the impossibility of drawing a firm boundary between science and nonscience and for so breaking the scientific community out of the philosophical sterility of Cold War pragmatism. Thanks to the hippie iconoclasts, scientists could again think Big Thoughts. And though many of the Fysiks Group's thoughts veered into the outre, one line of thought rescued John Bell's pioneering work on quantum entanglement from obscurity, so making possible the marvels of quantum encryption. Science has never been more unpredictable or more entertaining!--Christensen, Bryc. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Most laypersons view scientific research either as a series of eureka moments or an evenly spaced staircase of discoveries. In fact, neither view is accurate. Each scientific field has periods of great discovery and rapid expansion (organic chemistry in the 1800s, classical genetics in the early 1900s), periods of consolidation (early 17th-century medicine), and stagnation. In the 1970s, physics was in a period of retrenchment. When a talented group of physicists began meeting to exchange ideas, their shared thoughts and speculations brought about a physics renaissance. This is the story of their mental explorations. Sean Runnette, a highly capable reader, does a good job with sometimes difficult concepts. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of science or ideas. [For a less laudatory take on this title, read the review of the Norton hc, LJ 4/15/11.-Ed.]-I. Pour-El, Des Moines Area Community Coll., Boone, IA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An enthusiastic account of a coterie of physicists who, during the 1970s, embraced New Age fads and sometimes went on to make dramatic discoveries.In his first book, Kaiser (Physics/MIT) paints a gloomy portrait of his field during that decade. The golden age of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli et al was history. The Cold War and increased government support had vastly increased the number of physicists, including many who yearned to explore Einstein-style paradoxes and the nature of reality but were bored by classes which stressed mundane practical applications. In 1975, Berkeley graduate students took matters into their own hands, organizing an informal "Fundamental Fysiks Group." They attracted like-minded hip doctorates, so discussions mixed quantum theory with the latest counterculture delights from LSD to Eastern mysticism to ESP. They received generous media attention, including a Time cover story and produced a flood of publications about the "new physics" including bestsellers such as Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. With financial support from unexpected sources such as the CIA (worried about possible Soviet PSI weapons) and various young millionaires including Werner Erhard, they explored complex, hitherto ignored areas such as Bell's theorem and quantum entanglement while annoying the establishment by exploring their links to the paranormal. The end result was a transformation in cutting-edge physics and major discoveries in quantum information science, now a thriving industry.Readers will enjoy this entertaining chronicle of colorful young scientists whose sweeping curiosity turned up no hard evidence for psychic phenomena but led to new ways of looking into the equally bizarre quantum world.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
