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Physics Today

Notes on the hippies who saved physics

Jack Sarfatti

Published Jan 30, 2013• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

During some heavy cleaning, I happened to notice Sam Schweber’s review of David Kaiser’s book How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (Physics Today, September 2011, page 59).I was a graduate student at Brandeis University in 1960–62, but I quit to work in the defense industry. I did so mainly because Schweber and others discouraged my claim that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect implied a faster-than-light information transfer. That was years before Bell’s theorem. I had gotten the idea from reading David Bohm’s Quantum Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1951) in my senior year at Cornell University and David Inglis’s 1961 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics about the tau–theta puzzle. Schweber and the others basically told me to “shut up and calculate.” I finished my PhD at the University of California, Riverside, in August 1969 after a master’s at UC San Diego in 1967.Schweber’s review gives the false impression in the first paragraph that Elizabeth Rauscher’s Fundamental Fysiks Group was merely “a small group of graduate students.” That is a gross misrepresentation of Kaiser’s clear text to the contrary. Most of the members, including department head Geoffrey Chew, Henry Stapp, John Clauser, Nick Herbert, and me, already had PhDs. In addition, Herbert was not a “peripheral member” of the group but a core member from the beginning. And finally, Schweber’s claim that Bell’s theorem was not obscure prior to 1975 is falsified by the statistics that Kaiser presents very clearly in his book.© 2013 American Institute of Physics.

DOI
10.1063/pt.3.1869

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During some heavy cleaning, I happened to notice Sam Schweber’s review of David Kaiser’s book How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (Physics Today, September 2011, page 59).I was a graduate student at Brandeis University in 1960–62, but I quit to work in the defense industry. I did so mainly because Schweber and others discouraged my claim that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect implied a faster-than-light information transfer. That was years before Bell’s theorem. I had gotten the idea from reading David Bohm’s Quantum Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1951) in my senior year at Cornell University and David Inglis’s 1961 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics about the tau–theta puzzle. Schweber and the others basically told me to “shut up and calculate.” I finished my PhD at the University of California, Riverside, in August 1969 after a master’s at UC San Diego in 1967.Schweber’s review gives the false impression in the first paragraph that Elizabeth Rauscher’s Fundamental Fysiks Group was merely “a small group of graduate students.” That is a gross misrepresentation of Kaiser’s clear text to the contrary. Most of the members, including department head Geoffrey Chew, Henry Stapp, John Clauser, Nick Herbert, and me, already had PhDs. In addition, Herbert was not a “peripheral member” of the group but a core member from the beginning. And finally, Schweber’s claim that Bell’s theorem was not obscure prior to 1975 is falsified by the statistics that Kaiser presents very clearly in his book.© 2013 American Institute of Physics.
In 1985, David Mermin, a solid-state physicist at Cornell, wrote a funny and informative account of the EPR argument and Bell’s theorem for Physics Today, the Wall Street Journal of the American physics community. Mermin’s article generated a resurgence of interest in the subject, which swept like a cresting wave through the cocktail-party circuit and just as quickly receded. I recall confused discussions from this period with members of my generation, who alternately declared Bell’s theorem trivial, uninteresting, or the greatest discovery since Einstein proved moving clocks go slowly. One sentiment produced universal agreement, however: Do not write papers or apply for grants in the area, since “philosophical” issues are career killers.
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