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Quantum Outsiders COURTESY OF F. A. WOLF OF F. COURTESY In the 1970s, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Fred Alan Wolf and others in the Fundamental Fysiks Group opened up discussions of quantum mechanics. PHYSICS to produce gadgets to change the course of the cold war left little time for philosophizing. This meant that some of the key work in quantum mechanics in the 1970s and 1980s Quantum outsiders was done by a motley crew of young physi- cists, who worked largely outside universi- Hugh Gusterson enjoys a history of the quirky group that ties and published in obscure journals such pursued quantum physics when it was unfashionable. as Epistemological Letters — “a hand-typed, mimeographed newsletter”. They included Elizabeth Rauscher, Jack Sarfatti, Fred Alan t is hard to write a book about quantum emergence of ultra- Wolf, Saul-Paul Sirag, John Clauser and mechanics that is at once intellectually secure technologies, Fritjof Capra. The centre of their intellec- serious and a page-turner. But David based on quantum tual universe was the San Francisco Bay area. IKaiser succeeds in his account of a neglected encryption, for trans- Many were associated with the Fundamen- but important group of physicists who ferring money or tal Fysiks Group, an open discussion group brought together quantum mechanics, East- electronic votes. Such about quantum mechanics that started ern religion, parapsychology and the hallu- concepts were also, meeting in 1975 at the Lawrence Berkeley cinogen LSD. in ways that Kaiser Laboratory in California. Kaiser, a historian of science at the does not explore, Unable to secure professorships in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in influential beyond shrunken job market of the time, some of How the Hippies Cambridge, seeks to understand why a set of physics. Their cri- Saved Physics: the group lived on the edge of destitution. mind-bending ideas developed in the 1920s tique of reductionism Science, The luckiest was Fritjof Capra, whose book and 1930s by European physicists — includ- and emphasis on the Counterculture, The Tao of Physics (Wildwood House, 1975) ing Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Max effects of observers and the Quantum was translated into 23 languages and brought Born and Wolfgang Pauli — were largely led to the rise of ‘post- Revival him financial security. Other Fysiks members barred from discussion in mainstream US structuralist’ thinking DAVID KAISER cobbled together eccentric funding sources: W. W. Norton: 2011. physics after the Second World War. At the in the humanities. 372 pp. $26.95, George Weissmann founded a company heart of quantum mechanics lie these chal- But during the cold £19.99 selling a Tibetan herbal remedy until the lenging ideas: that electrons behave like waves war, the profound US Food and Drug Administration banned and particles; that one can know a particle’s philosophical issues raised by quantum his product. And others secured funding precise location or momentum but not both; mechanics were seen by many in physics as through the Pentagon to see whether quan- that the act of observing a particle changes its an unnecessary distraction. tum mechanics might explain the apparent behaviour; and that particles seem to com- Tracing shifts in university lecture notes spoon-bending abilities of psychics such as municate with one another across great dis- and textbooks after the Second World War, Uri Geller and to investigate telepathy. tances — the phenomena of nonlocality and Kaiser argues that the fundamental strange- Three New Age guru– entanglement that Albert Einstein derided as ness of quantum reality was drained out of entrepreneurs were even NATURE.COM “spooky action at a distance”. academic physics by the “high-throughput more colourful. Wer- David Kaiser on These radical concepts led to the field pedagogy” that accompanied a sixfold ner Erhard, founder of university funding: of quantum information science and the increase in PhD student numbers. Pressure the Est movement for go.nature.com/oflvik 278 | NATURE | VOL 476 | 18 AUGUST 2011 | CORRECTED 4 APRIL 2012 © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT self-transformation, sponsored opulent EVOLUTION conferences on quantum mechanics at his San Francisco mansion. Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group and Nobel laure- ates both enjoyed Erhard’s patronage despite The long trek to some physicists’ concerns about Est’s prac- tices. Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen retreat on the California coast, sponsored domesticated bliss workshops at which physicists alternated their hot-tub discussions of quantum mechanics Our fondness for fauna comes from an evolved with massages and, in some cases, LSD trips. human need to nurture, argues Juliet Clutton-Brock. A third New Age activist and impresario, Ira Einhorn, somehow persuaded senior executives at Bell Telephone that the com- n The Animal Connection, palaeo­ evolution of human pany should copy and mail the latest papers anthropologist Pat Shipman describes language, the origin on quantum mechanics to some 300 people how humans have been connected of symbolism and — an early postal version of an e-mail dis- Iwith animals for the past 2.6 million years, the theory of mind. tribution list. This arrangement came to an and how this relationship distinguishes She proposes that abrupt end when the police discovered the us from other animals. She argues that language followed decomposing body of Einhorn’s girlfriend in the evolution of human behaviour was from the need for a trunk in his apartment. driven by this connection in three stages: humans to com- Interspersing entertaining anecdotes with toolmaking, language and domestication municate animal- explanations of concepts in quantum phys- of animals and plants. But Shipman’s book related information ics, Kaiser’s book can be read on many levels. is more a review of what has long been in their quest for The Animal At its most challenging, it is an intellectual known than the “New Perspective” prom- food. Language Connection: A New Perspective history of quantum mechanics. But it is also ised by its subtitle. “allowed humans to on What Makes us a yarn about an eccentric group of physicists Shipman starts by outlining the charac- talk about animals Human who refused to be defeated by their margin- teristics that separate the fossil hominin and in time, with PAT SHIPMAN alization within their own discipline. And, Ardipithecus ramidus — found in Ethio- animals”, she says. W. W. Norton: 2011. as social history, it offers a window onto one pia and dated to around 4.2 million years Towards the end 336 pp. $26.95, £20 of the most colourful periods of twentieth- ago — from other primates. Continuing of the Pleistocene, century US history. on through the australopithecines, she around 32,000 years ago, came the first The book makes important observations describes how, from 2.6 million years ago, domestic dogs. The cultivation of plants about the social dynamics of physics in the “Hominids transformed rocks into stone and the domestication of livestock in United States during the cold war. Kaiser tools and stone tools transformed homi- many parts of the world followed in the argues that, even as military patronage nids from bipedal apes that are [sic] basi- early Holocene. Shipman describes what is pumped massive financial resources into cally herbivorous into predators”. This was known about this process, including argu- physics, the discipline’s horizons shrank. the beginning of the animal connection, ments around the outdated view that the University physicists disdained the philo- accompanying the evolution of Homo erec- primary motive for domestication was the sophical questions that had enlivened tus and its expansion out of Africa. provision of meat. She also explores ‘self- pre-war European physics and developed Shipman goes on to discuss the domestication’ — the theory that, from a narrowly instrumentalist pedagogy that sometimes became a straitjacket. Kaiser describes some students holding secret meetings to discuss quantum mechan- ics behind their advisers’ backs, having been warned that “thinking seriously about foun- dations was a waste of time and a detriment W. R. BILENDUKE/GETTY to one’s career”. He also notes that the editor of Physical Review banned articles discuss- ing interpretations of quantum mechanics; a brilliant experiment on Bell’s theorem by John Clauser was scarcely cited because of the pre- vailing orthodoxy. Clauser was told that his experiment was not “real physics”, and he had a terrible time on the job market. By contrast, the heroes of Kaiser’s story “strove to expand the physics profession’s collective mental space”. This is an equally apt description of Kaiser’s approach in this illuminating book. ■ Hugh Gusterson is professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia 22030, USA. His latest book is People of the Bomb. e-mail: [email protected] Domesticated 32,000 years ago, dogs remain central to many societies, including the Inuit. 18 AUGUST 2011 | VOL 476 | NATURE | 279 © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS scavenging around human settlements, ASTRONOMY wild animals gradually became habitu- ated, were selected for tameness, and over generations became domesticated. Shipman outlines the distinction of true Supernova century domestication from taming as “the per- manence of the change in the wild ani- Jay Pasachoff relishes a novel that brings to life the mal”. Yet she misses what I believe is the scientific stars of the 1600s. essence of why humans relate so readily to animals, which is supported by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in her book on the evolu- omewhat eclipsed in popular culture on the interaction of tion of hominins as cooperative breeders, by his great Italian contemporary Gali- each with Rudolph Mothers and Others (Harvard University leo Galilei, Johannes Kepler is finally II, the Holy Roman Press, 2009). Sachieving the iconic status he has long held Emperor, who became Humans, Blaffer Hrdy says, alone in science.
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