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How the Hippies Saved Physics: Adventures with Bell's Theorem, Then and Now

David I. Kaiser

Bulletin of the American Physical SocietyMar 4, 20190 citations

Notes on the hippies who saved physics

Jack Sarfatti

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.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.

Physics TodayJan 30, 20130 citations

Superluminal signals: an engineer's perspective

Thilo Sauter

Physics Letters AApr 1, 200115 citations

Is Superluminal Signaling Possible in Collapse Theories of Quantum Mechanics?

Shan Gao

Foundations of PhysicsSep 23, 20230 citations

Quantum Physics for Hippies

Lukas Neumeier, Jun Matsuura, James S. Douglas

Apr 3, 20190 citations

Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory

Tian Yu Cao

Quantum field theory is a powerful language for the description of the subatomic constituents of the physical world and the laws and principles that govern them. This book contains up-to-date in-depth analyses, by a group of eminent physicists and philosophers of science, of our present understanding of its conceptual foundations, of the reasons why this understanding has to be revised so that the theory can go further, and of possible directions in which revisions may be promising and productive. These analyses will be of interest to graduate students and research workers in physics who want to know about the foundational problems of their subject. The book will also be of interest to professional philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, because it contains much material for metaphysical and methodological reflections, for historical and cultural analyses, and for sociological analyses of the way in which various factors contribute to the way the foundations are revised.Quantum field theory is a powerful language for the description of the subatomic constituents of the physical world and the laws and principles that govern them. This book contains up-to-date in-depth analyses, by a group of eminent physicists and philosophers of science, of our present understanding of its conceptual foundations, of the reasons why this understanding has to be revised so that the theory can go further, and of possible directions in which revisions may be promising and productive. These analyses will be of interest to graduate students and research workers in physics who want to know about the foundational problems of their subject. The book will also be of interest to professional philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, because it contains much material for metaphysical and methodological reflections, for historical and cultural analyses, and for sociological analyses of the way in which various factors contribute to the way the foundations are revised.

Cambridge University Press eBooksFeb 18, 1999201 citations

Design for a Superluminal Signaling Device

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