Image: W.W. Norton & Company
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the new book HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser.
Rarely can we date with any precision the ebbs and flows of scientists’ research styles or intellectual approaches. Yet these transitions—the how’s and why’s behind major shifts in a scientific field’s reigning questions and methods—have long held a special fascination for me. We see laid bare in these moments a messy alchemy, intermixing the world of institutions with the world of ideas. Brilliant insights and dazzling discoveries take their place alongside political decisions, funding battles, personal rivalries, and cultural cues. These many ingredients combine to make one agenda seem worth pursuing in a particular time and place—and worth teaching to students—while quietly eclipsing other questions or approaches that had beckoned with equal urgency only a few years earlier.
In the case of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which ultimately spawned quantum information science, we may detect just such a seismic shift in the 1970s. The physics profession in the United States suffered the lashings of a perfect storm between 1968 and 1972. Internal audits at the Department of Defense led to massive cutbacks on spending for basic research, which had financed, directly or indirectly, nearly all graduate training in physics for decades. Desperate for more soldiers to feed the escalation of fighting in the Vietnam War, meanwhile, military planners began to revoke draft deferments for students—first for undergraduates in 1967, then, two years later, for graduate students as well—reversing twenty years of draft policies that had kept physics students in their classrooms. Across the country, the Cold War coalition between the Pentagon and the universities crumbled under wave after wave of teach-ins and sit-ins, ultimately lost in a tear gas fog. Amid the turmoil, the nation’s economy slid into “stagflation”: rising inflation coupled with stagnant economic growth. All at once, physicists faced massive budget cuts, a plummeting job market, and vanishing student enrollments.
As the Cold War nexus of institutions and ideas collapsed, other modes of being a physicist crept back in. The transition was neither smooth nor painless. Caught in the upheavals, a ragtag crew of young physicists banded together. Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, both graduate students in Berkeley, California, founded an informal discussion group in a fit of pique and frustration in May 1975. From their earliest years they had been captivated by books about the great revolutions of modern physics: relativity and quantum theory. They had entered the field with heads full of Einstein-styled paradoxes; they, too, dreamed of tackling the deepest questions of space, time, and matter. Yet their formal training had offered none of that. By the time they entered graduate school, the watershed of World War II and the hyperpragmatism of the Cold War had long since shorn off any philosophical veneer from physics students’ curricula. In place of grand thoughts, their classes taught them narrow skills: how to calculate this or that physical effect, rather than what those fancy equations might portend about the nature of reality.
The two students had ties to the Theoretical Physics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a sprawling national laboratory nestled in the Berkeley hills. They decided to do for themselves what their teachers and textbooks had not. Reserving a big seminar room at the lab, they established an open-door policy: anyone interested in the interpretation of quantum theory was welcome to attend their weekly meetings, joining the others around the large circular table for free-ranging discussions. They continued to meet, week in and week out, over the next three and a half years. They called themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group.”
4 Comments
Add CommentThat seemed like a really round-about, rambling way to say that sometimes "out of the box" thinking produces ground-breaking changes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Brevity is the soul of wit." -From Shakespeare's Hamlet, 1602
@tharriss: You remind us that saying nothing is sometimes even better than brevity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hate to nit-pick, but this article is titled "How the Hippies Saved Physics", and if you read the whole article, what it ends up saying is that, the hippies didn't save physics at all. So I feel sort of cheated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like the idea that all points of view are welcome and that in those times other interpretations and ideas about physics was welcome. That does not seem to be the case anymore.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs an alternative to Quantum Theory there is a new theory that describes and explains the mysteries of physical reality. While not disrespecting the value of Quantum Mechanics as a tool to explain the role of quanta in our universe. This theory states that there is also a classical explanation for the paradoxes such as EPR and the Wave-Particle Duality. The Theory is called the Theory of Super Relativity. This theory is a philosophical attempt to reconnect the physical universe to realism and deterministic concepts. It explains the mysterious. Google search super relativity to see the website for further explanation.