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HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS: SCIENCE, COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE QUANTUM REVIVAL PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

David Kaiser | 416 pages | 12 Sep 2012 | WW Norton & Co | 9780393342314 | English | New York, United States How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival PDF Book This is not a book about physics, but a book about how the nature of philosophical questions about physics was preserved by the Fundamental Fysics Group FFG , a group of disaffected from the mainstream physicists who tried their damne In a word, ug. I recommend this book for anyone with an interest in quantam mechanics because the history of that field is incomplete without it. Things were slow at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory compared to the boom years, and budgets had already begun to shrink. Fundamental to Einstein and company's reasoning was that quantum objects carried with them—on their backs, as it were—complete sets of definite properties at all times. Clauser, a budding experimentalist, realized that Bell's theorem could be amenable to real-world tests in a laboratory. Aug 06, Chris rated it liked it. Quantum was a cartoon rendition of Fred Alan Wolf, who resigned from the physics faculty at San Diego State College in the mids to become a New Age vaudevillian, combining motivational speaking, quantum weirdness and magic tricks in an act that opened several times for Timothy Leary. Clauser would later write with great passion that in those years, physicists who showed any interest in the foundations of labored under a "stigma," as powerful and keenly felt as any wars of religion or McCarthy-like political purges. The author also gives us quite a lot about entanglement, especially on the Bell inequality which was used to demonstrate that entangled particles really do seem to act non-locally, instantly communicating at a distance. At least astronomers struck me as honest about what they didn't understand. Together they decided to mount a brand-new experiment to test Bell's theorem. No matter what each bartender asks them, they will give opposite answers. It's easy to explain if it's planned or arranged or there's some type of communication between the two, but none of those arrangements exist. In some ways mimicking the Olympus Group of the original physicists Einstein, Bohr, etc , at least in their openness to new ideas, if not in the scale of their achievement, this group, taking advantage of the freewheeling environment of the post-Sixties era, including the New Age perspective, explored the potential consequences and implications of quantum non-locality and entanglement, which ultimately helped usher in and quantum information science, with applications in cryptography, communications and beyond. Jan 03, Ben Thompson rated it liked it. This book traces the early seeds of those fields, the difficulty the authors had in getting published, and the group of out-there Berkeley physicists and physics groupies who glommed onto the research, added to it, spread it around, and popularised it. I mean it seems like the real avenue of interest here is how whenever some new way of seeing the world is revealed--electromagnetism way back when, for example--everyone, even scientists, or especially scientists, immediately leap into imagining mind-reading, ghosts, etc. Is there an answer? In Newton's physics, the behavior of an apple or a planet was completely determined by its initial state—variables like position where it was and momentum where it was going —and the forces acting upon it; no probabilities in sight. To ask other readers questions about How the Hippies Saved Physics , please sign up. Many people thought that book was too long and they just couldn't get through it. A hurricane scuttled his plans; he and his boat got held up in Florida, and he wound up having to drive it clear across the country instead. The EPR authors described a source, such as a radioactive nucleus, that shot out pairs of particles with the same speed but in opposite directions. Audiobook was dull performance. Now rotate the magnets, so that the magnetic field is pointing along some different direction. I was surprised by the efforts some put into paranormal research. But some of the most interesting and promising fruits of quantum physics, quantum cryptography and , came about through just such musings. Bulgarian translation of this page by Stoil Dragomirov. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival Writer

Together they derived a variation on Bell's theme: a new expression, more amenable to direct comparisons with laboratory data than Bell's had been. I thought for a while that I wanted to be a physicist. A joint paper, Shimony felt, would no doubt be stronger than either of their separate efforts alone would be—the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts—and, on top of that, "it was the civilized way to handle the priority question. Error rating book. A lively, entertaining story that illuminates the relationship between creativity and scientific progress, How the Hippies Saved Physics takes us to a time when only the unlikeliest heroes could break the science world out of its rut. Based on the glimpse into the lives of the people Kaiser gives us, I Kaiser interwove a fascinating tapestry of the colorful cultural history of the '60s and beyond with the developments of the field of physics. People can associate with each other and just be polite. The hippies in question were doing a lot of interesting experimentation, and expanding on ideas that cold war physics had left behind in favor of developing weapons. It was also a shame to see the almost unquestioning acceptance of the supposed "psychic" powers of professional magicians by Uri Geller. Not a chance. In the years following his impetuous shouting matches, Bell tried to keep these doubts to himself. Sep 16, Jim rated it really liked it Shelves: audiobooks-read , quantum- physics , audiobooks-overdrive. Accordingly physicists began to find correlations between Eastern Philosophy and Metaphysics. Peacetime comes, budgets are cut and these same geniuses sometimes go on welfare or have to pander themselves just to eat. I'm not a scientist but I thoroughly enjoyed this well-told tale, to the point of wanting to read several of the other books for-non-scientists Kaiser mentions in his story, which were written by some of the leading figures he discusses. Quotes from How the Hippies S Bell and his wife Mary, also a physicist, moved to CERN, Europe's multinational high-energy physics laboratory that had recently been established in Geneva. It is, in principle, a tricky argument to make: what is evi Kaiser takes a line similar to that of his New Age protagonists: he's trying to sell you something. David Kaiser's book is a refreshing look at the era when New Age flavored books about physics gained popularity. Don't read this book unless you like the genres of history and biography in addition to Physics. There is the Esalen institute a New Age retreat in California, Werner Erhard and Est who were part of the human potential movement, Henry Dakin the philanthropist and supporter of paranormal research, and the CIA with its experiments. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Showing No matter which way the magnets are aligned, moreover, one-half of the incoming electrons will be deflected upward and one-half downward. Fundamental to Einstein and company's reasoning was that quantum objects carried with them—on their backs, as it were—complete sets of definite properties at all times. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival Reviews

For one thing, whereas large objects like the Earth can spin, in principle, at any rate whatsoever, quantum particles possess fixed amounts of it: either no spin at all, or one-half unit, or one whole unit, or three-halves units, and so on. It happens. They studied quantum entanglement and Bell's Theorem through the lens of Eastern mysticism and psychic mind-reading, discussing the latest research while lounging in hot tubs. Nov 11, Bookjazzer rated it liked it. Again I don't think this should be an end I have to be honest here, the approach taken by the author is not one I was totally comfortable with. With the green light from Townes, Clauser began to scavenge spare parts from storage closets around the Berkeley lab —"I've gotten pretty good at dumpster diving," as he put it recently—and soon he had duct-taped together a contraption capable of measuring the correlated polarizations of pairs of photons. This book could have used another couple passes through the editorial machine. A spin one-half particle, for example, can exist in only one of two states: either spin "up" or spin "down" with respect to a given direction in space. For every three- paragraph summation of someone's "mystical experience" I have the feeling that each one could perhaps make up their own book, all on its own. The genesis of the group discussed in this book, the Fundamental Fysiks Group, lay in there being no other format in which they could discuss the ideas that drove them passionately. Nov 18, Craig Werner rated it liked it Shelves: sixties , science. A bestseller was born. In his bones he hoped locality would win. Soon Clauser would be kicked out of some of the finest offices in physics, from Robert Serber's at Columbia to Richard Feynman's at Caltech. Beyond that Kaiser is able to render in plain English the paths of investigation and results they achieved, the questions they raised, no small achievement. Like the protagonists of Kaiser's book, I wanted to understand quantum mechanics. Quotes from How the Hippies S Together they decided to mount a brand-new experiment to test Bell's theorem. Another of the physicists in the book went on to develop HeartMath technology, which is one of the best modern biofeedback systems around. One could choose to measure a particle's spin along any direction: the z -axis, the y -axis, or any angle in between. A good friend of mine, knowing how much I like trivia and history, bought me this book at a Boston book signing event.

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Read Our Latest Issue. Following WWII, the Cold War ushered in a time when most physicists worked for the military complex, and were expected to "shut up and compute" as they made high tech gadgets. But once everyone got focused on gadgets, on bombs and atomic drives, and physics enrollments boomed because science funding was up, students were discouraged from such "philosophy". Their importance lay in the fact that they kept the torch burning for the pursuit of fundamental questions, and, Kaiser notes, their highly public mistakes and deviations paved the way for more mainstream thinkers to make advances in the field of physics - particularly in subfields like laser technology and quantum encryption and computing. But Bell also read in Born's book that another great of the interwar generation, the Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann, had published a proof as early as demonstrating that hidden variables could not be made compatible with quantum mechanics. But it is a mildly entertaining oddity in the history of science - and as this can be a little dull sometimes, it's not at all a bad thing that it has been covered. Using only a few lines of algebra, Bell proved that no local hidden variables theory could ever reproduce the same degree of correlations as one varied the angles between detectors. Readers also enjoyed. Sep 17, Nancy rated it it was ok Shelves: did-not-finish , history , science. Put one in a restaurant in Europe and the other in one in Canada. The "ask no questions" attitude frustrated Bell, who remained unconvinced that had really vanquished the last of Einstein's critiques long ago and that there was nothing left to worry about. But as MIT physicist and historian David Kaiser reveals, this cutting-edge field has a surprisingly psychedelic past. However their efforts led them into new territory in understanding the nature of non-local effects, subtle features of the quantum theory that prevent all proposed forms of super-luminal communication. Quantum objects, in his view, simply did not possess sharp values for all properties at all times. It's quantum mechanics. He details how Werner Earnhardt the creator of the self-help classes got caught in the middle of a pissing match between physicists and came out with a sullied reputation just because he funded symposiums. This was certainly more history than science, although the author does his best to explain the conundrums of quantum physics to the non-scientist. But there's no use trying to understand it, to form a mental picture, to ask what it means. It turns out, as David Kaiser shows, quite a lot. Nonlocality was indeed endemic to quantum mechanics, Bell had shown: somehow, the outcome of the measurement on particle B depended on the measured outcome on particle A, even if the two particles were separated by huge distances at the time those measurements were made. There they hashed out a plan to join forces. You know the saying: There's no time like the present Well, the hippies didn't save physics, though Kaiser's pretty much aware of that. But I must admit that sometimes, after pondering the deepest questions and imaginatively correlating them with bizarre physics theories that I have heard discussed, I am "snapped back into reality," and mechanically find myself asking, as does one of the characters in the book, "Do we have to do bad physics to feel good? Bell realized that Bohm's variation of the EPR thought experiment, involving particles' spins, offered two main advantages over EPR's original version. Clauser completed his dissertation not long after their meeting. Kaiser draws an important parallel between Eintein's Olympia Academy, a loose group of coffee drinking physics enthusiasts and the Fundamental Fysiks Group. Throughout the book he discusses the developments of quantum theory and the lives of the physicists. Bell had assumed for simplicity that detectors would have infinitesimally narrow windows or apertures through which particles could pass.

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