IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2013 - 11

perhaps explaining what Geller was demonstrating.
Sarfatti in particular became a Geller apologist/publicist. Strangely, the CIA and Defense Department were
sucked into these ideas, seeing the possibility of a cold
war weapon which they were convinced the Soviet
union already possessed, and pumped millions of
dollars into funding research, much of it going to SrI.
If you can remember the hippie era you'll recall
two gurus: Werner Erhard, founder of the so-called
EST movement, promising a Zen-based method of
self knowledge and improvement, and Michael Murphy, creator of Esalen, an organization and retreat,
still in existence in Big Sur, California, that is nearly
synonymous with what came to be called the human
potential movement, rooted in eastern mysticism,
meditation, nude, coed hot bath immersions and a
good deal of drug experimenting. Both Erhard and
Murphy were science buffs and were drawn into a
world that seemed to blend physics, the occult, and
eastern mysticism. Erhard was soon providing financial support to FFG people, while Murphy's Esalen
hosted conferences devoted to their concerns. Famous
physicists, (like CalTech's richard Feynman) some
of them quite skeptical, but liking the natural setting,
the luxury, and the chance to interact with other lively
minds sometimes chaired these meetings.
Why might someone even joke that hippies saved
physics? What did they accomplish? Think for a
moment of perpetual motion machines, the bane of
the patent office until it started a tough policy on such
applications. Throughout the latter half of the 19th
century, physicists took proposals for these devices
seriously, and their efforts to discredit the gadgets
led to important results in conservation of energy
and thermodynamics. Similarly, the trouble-making
hippies stimulated groundbreaking work by theoreticians, both inside and more often outside of the FFG.
Among their findings was a proof of what has become
known as the "no signaling theorem" which has found
its place in standard quantum mechanics textbooks. It
asserts that quantum entanglement cannot be used to
send signals faster than light. The theorem arose in
response to a proposal for superluminal communication by FFG member Nick Herbert.
The FFG crowd can also take credit for stimulating
others to derive a law of direct practical importance in
technology: the no cloning theorem, again written to
undercut the quest for superluminal communication.

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It asserts that you cannot make perfect copies of a
photon's unknown quantum state. The result has been
exploited in quantum encryption, which allows the
sending of information, like election results, with perfect security. The arrangement allows for immediate
detection of any effort to eavesdrop on the information, and has resulted in a billion dollar industry.
One of Kaiser's best chapters tells what happened
to his hippies after the FFG disbanded in 1979. None
turned into tenured college professors. Some became
best selling authors, seeking to explain the new physics to the general public and connecting its mysteries to Hindu and Buddhist practices. Sarfatti's history
is particularly interesting as an instance of reinvention. Falling out with Geller and with the heads of
both Esalen and EST, he jumped to the political right.
Kaiser tells us of his cozying up to members of the
reagan administration in an effort to obtain Defense
Department funding for his proposal to use quantum
entanglement as a "star wars" antimissile weapon. He
recently described himself as a "countercultural radical conservative who hobnobs with reaganites and
billionaires."
Some humorless newspaper reviewers have chided
Kaiser over his book's title, since he never proves
that the "hippies saved physics," but he is too good a
scientist and historian to make this claim seriously, a
fact he states early where he compares his title to the
slightly facetious notion that the Irish saved civilization [1]. His "saving physics" is a nostalgic reminder
of the jokiness and "put on" of the hippie era. These
reviewers miss Kaiser's important historical points:
that the reputed hostility of the counterculture to technology and science, as promoted by some 1960s era
social historians, is wrong, and that this same culture
benefited not only physics but the advancement of
technology.2

References

[1] T. Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization. New York, NY: Anchor
1995.
[2] T. roszak, The Making of a Counterculture. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
[3] E.S. Brand, The Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola
Inst., 1968.

For a presentation of this hostility see [2]. For a view of how the
counterculture did embrace technology, see The Whole Earth Catalog [3],
first published in 1968. The Wikipedia entry for this catalog is also useful.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2013