IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2013 - 9

A. DAVID WUNSCH

How the Hippies Saved Physics
By David Kaiser. Norton, 2011, 372 pages.

bout 20 years ago when David Kaiser was
a college undergraduate he encountered
Dr. Ludwig Plutonium. Each day this
"curious individual" rode into town on a
bicycle, worked as a dishwasher at the local inn, and
lectured from the school quadrangle. This man, who
had legally changed his name to Ludwig Plutonium,
believed that the universe was a gigantic plutonium
atom and that the earth was just an electron orbiting
around the nucleus. Dr. P. took out advertisements in
the school newspaper and filled them with mathematical proofs of his work. Did this "doctor" know any
physics? Yes. Did he advance mankind's knowledge
of physics? No. Was he a crackpot? Yes. But, as Kaiser, an M.I.T. professor, so handsomely demonstrates
in this book, one must be careful about using the c
word.
He reminds us that in the early years of the 20th
century a small group of underemployed physicists
gathered in Berne, Switzerland. These friends, who
immodestly called themselves The Olympia Academy, argued ideas at the intersection of physics and
philosophy, and were unafraid to ask themselves
open-ended and seemingly naive questions, e.g., what
is time, and what is meant by simultaneous events?
Crackpots? The President of the Olympians was
Albert Einstein who, a few years after this period of
ferment, published his revolutionary ideas on relativity and quantum mechanics.
The historical background to Kaiser's story is a
boom period for government funding in physics that
grew out of the scientific successes of World War
II. In postwar America, job offers were plentiful if
you had a Ph.D. in physics; classroom enrollments
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2263642
Date of publication: 5 June 2013

ballooned, professors were in demand, and the Soviet
launching of Sputnik added to the abundance.
Trouble struck about 1968 when the Pentagon
diverted money from basic research to waging war.
Meanwhile, campuses became hostile to defense
department funding, adding to the hard times. Kaiser explains that in 1971 the Placement Dept. of the
American Institute of Physics registered 1053 applicants competing for 53 jobs.
Why "hippies" in the title? The book is about how
circa mid 1970s a bunch of young physicists, all of
them male with one important exception, and without
job prospects, banded together to ask themselves some
questions about the fundamental concepts in quantum
mechanics. Here we're reminded of The Olympians.
The major player here was The Fundamental Fysik's
Group [FFG] at u.C. Berkeley, founded in the spring
of 1975. If you were a graduate student in California
then, or a recent Ph.D., you might well have been
part of the hippie culture. The Group was not immune
to the blandishments of LSD, marijuana, casual sex,
Zen, and the rest of the counterculture package. With
time, some became deeply immersed.
Kaiser introduces us to around 20 characters who
were either FFG members or fellow travelers in the contemporary West Coast Consciousness Theory Group
or the Physics/Consciousness research Group. unless
you have a keen memory, you'll want to make a list
of them as you read, although you'll probably have no
trouble recalling the one woman: the FFG cofounder,
Elizabeth rauscher. Another name that will stick in
your mind is Jack Sarfatti - one of the most colorful,
difficult, and arrogant of the bunch. Strange to say, I
knew him at Junior High 240 in Brooklyn circa 19511953, where he went by the name of Jack Sarfatt; by
the time he turned up in my class at Cornell in 1956 he
was Jacque Sarfatti. A man with three names displays

A. David Wunsch is Book Review Editor of this magazine and Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Massachusetts Lowell. Email: A_Wunsch@uml.edu.
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SuMMEr 2013

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