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“The Scientist as Educator and Public Citizen: Linus Pauling and His Era.” - October 29 - 30, 2007

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“The Scientist as Educator and Public Citizen: Linus Pauling and His Era.”
October 29 - 30, 2007

Video: “Zen and the Art of Textbook Publishing: Quantum Mechanics and Counterculture in the 1970s”, David Kaiser

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37:20 - Abstract | Biography | More Videos from Session I: Scientists and Textbooks

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Mary Jo Nye: We heard, in the first part of the session, two speakers talking mainly about chemistry. We now turn to speakers who will be speaking from the standpoint of physics and textbooks. We’re glad to welcome back to campus David Kaiser who was here last year, and gave a wonderful and successful lecture that was co-sponsored by the physics department. David Kaiser is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society program at MIT. He’s also a lecturer in the Physics Department at MIT. David received a B.A. in Physics at Dartmouth, and he has two PhDs; one in Physics and one in History of Science from Harvard University. He is the author, fairly recently, of a book having to do with Feynman and Feynman’s diagrams and physics, called Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics. This traces how Richard Feynman’s idiosyncratic approach to quantum physics entered into the mainstream. David has edited several books, one of them specifically on pedagogy, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, coming out of a conference that he organized at MIT a few years ago. Today he is going to talk about something he’s incorporating into his next book. The title of his lecture is "Zen and the art of Textbook Publishing: Quantum Mechanics and Counterculture in the 1970’s." So let’s see what David has to say. [1:57]

David Kaiser: Thank you. I want to thank Mary Jo and Cliff Mead for organizing the conference. I’ve certainly enjoyed it so far. It’s a great pleasure to be back in Corvallis. The material I want to talk about today, as Mary Jo just mentioned, stems from the book I’m in the middle of. I was able to talk about some of this material back in February. And so this is, in some sense, what I’ve done with my summer vacation. So the talk is going to have three main parts. I’ll talk actually just briefly about the context of the larger project of which this material is meant to appear, and then talk mostly about people who looked like this once upon a time, which is really the reason I’m here. [Laughter] So, I’m going to look at what was going on in physics to and by young physicists in the 1970’s in the United States. And then zoom in at coming out of some of these fun discussions into books, some of which will, I’m sure, be quite familiar to some of us even today. Books like Fritjof Capra’s, The Tao of Physics, which turned out to be one of a great number of similar books that were coming out around this time. What I want to do, especially in this session on scientists and textbooks, is ask in part what do we even mean by a textbook, or what has counted as a textbook in different times and places? Is the genre itself still open to some investigation? [3:15]

So, I’m going to say briefly, I spend a lot of time staring at this curve. This one, the bottom one, which is showing you the number of PhD’s in physics, granted in the United States per year and so we can see some predictable features. Very rapid growth coming out of the end of World War II. Another very rapid growth after Sputnik and sort of the hardening of the Cold War. And then this part is sometimes forgotten, an equally rapid decline, a crash starting in approximately 1970. This curve, by the way, is what organizes the book. I liken it to a stock market bubble, this one will be more familiar to some people in the room I’m afraid. It has some generic features in common and one of the things I’m fascinated by in this book is that the physicists’ growth curve and the decline actually shows in greatest exaggerated form some very common trends throughout the American university system in the same years, so virtually every field grew, in terms of say graduate enrollments, in fact grew exponentially, just with a smaller exponent coming out of World War II; things like the G.I. Bill and a number of government programs and so on. Most fields grew very spectacularly in the years after Sputnik, just not quite as fast as physics. Most fields experience some decline starting around 1970, just none fell as catastrophically fast or hard as physics. So, physics, I’m suggesting in the book, becomes a sort of exaggerated form, a caricature as opposed to a formal portrait of general trends across American higher education in this period. [4:51]

So in the context of that, I return. Michael Gordon just teased me. I can never seem to get away from Richard Feynman and here he is again. In the context of that kind of very dramatic growth and crash, bubble type phenomenon, what do you do in classrooms? How does it and how might it affect the daily business of training young physicists and of getting some work done? So, here’s a picture of Richard Feynman, beloved teacher at Caltech, famous for his lecturing abilities across any level of student, from large popular audiences on up. Here’s a photo of him in sort of auditorium style seating classroom in 1962 at Caltech, giving one of his celebrated demonstrations. Here is not all that much later, in 1975. Crucially what’s happened, of course, in between, is that bubble has burst, and now he has a rather different type of pedagogical setting. He’s certainly still teaching, certainly by all accounts being extremely effective, but it’s a very, very different style of teaching, one can imagine happening in those two spaces. There are other changes that we can enumerate. His jacket and tie have clearly been lost, his collar has been widened, the student’s haircuts have gotten longer, the sandals are now propped up on the desk, and so on. There are a series of other changes we can see between these two snapshots, which we can elaborate a great length and with fun over lunch, but what I mostly want to focus on is what do these types of pedagogical settings encourage, make more feasible, discourage, and how might that be one way, among others, to try to understand the sort of sweep of intellectual life in physics, over this relatively short period of time. [6:26]

That’s all I want to say about the Cold War bubble. I want to talk about what some of the things are that happened in predominantly U.S. physics, with ties in fact to other places as well, in the depression years for American physics of the 1970’s. And so I want to talk about what some physicists start to do, with their compasses, you know, unmoored from the "one way" of doing physics, one set of expectations coming out of World War II in the general Cold War growth. What do you do when those sets of assumption and opinions change very rapidly? One thing that some people began to do is search for new topics. Here, by the way, for those who might not recognize him, is Uri Geller, a name that will probably be familiar to some. He was an Israeli magician turned self-proclaimed psychic being investigated by David Bohm, renowned theoretical physicist trained in the United States, then through a number of reasons, including the Red Scare, leaving the United States, by this point being an established physicist in London. [7:28]

Bohm spent quite a while in the mid 70’s investigating the reality, as far as he was concerned, of Uri Geller’s psychic effects and trying to craft a quantum mechanical explanation thereof. We’ll talk more about that. So, one thing they start doing is, different sorts of the topics rise to the forefront for at least certain constituencies in physics. They begin having these conversations in a new set of places, and this is a photograph of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, a couple hours south of San Francisco, and I would suggest to Mary Jo and to Cliff Mead, we have our next meeting here. It looks very nice. No offense to Corvallis. They also begin getting support of many kinds, financial as well as motivational, from a new cast of characters. This here is Werner Erhard. I’ll have more to say about him in a moment. One very visible effect of all this is a rapid outpouring of a new type of literature; books. Again these will probably still be familiar to many of us in the room. There are others that perhaps have rightfully been forgotten. But they’re coming out of this new mishmash of things happening in this very particular moment, in this down period for American physics. [8:40]

So let me say briefly, one thing again among many. One way in which a sort of philosophical engagement with quantum mechanics returned for American physicists, having been very forcefully pushed to the side during that Cold War run up, was through use of the basics of modern physics, relativity, and especially quantum mechanics, to understand the other side. Paranormal, or para-psychological phenomena, the X-Files, just twenty years before. And so in fact, there was an outpouring of efforts - and I’d be happy to speak at great length about this if you’d like - an outpouring of effort in professional journals and in a series of further field publication ventures trying to link up the latest, hottest, hardest stuff in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Are there hidden variables, of the sort that David Bohm and others had first begun thinking about? Are the famous probabilities of quantum mechanics only an aftereffect, but really at the micro world there are determined outcomes for each particle interaction? Or not? Are there non-local connections? Are there sort of telepathic links between objects that otherwise seem to be very far removed? And is that endemic to quantum mechanics? If so, what are its implications? These things troubled the founders of quantum mechanics back in the twenties and thirties, and they began to come back to many American physicists’ attention in this period. As we’ll see among other settings it’s to then be used to explain, for example, extrasensory perception or telepathy or precognition, which is a fancy way of saying "visions of the future". Remote viewing, which is also sometimes called ESPionage, could particularly enable individuals to see into, for example, defense plants in the Soviet Union from the comfort of their couch in Stanford or Palo Alto by harnessing para-psychological powers. Psycho kinesis, A.K.A. spoon bending - were there ways to use the powers of mind to affect material change? And there was an outpouring of effort to understand these things by a number of people. [10:41]

Geller figures prominently in the early stages of this. Here again is our friend Uri Geller standing by the Stanford Research Institute, established as a kind of spin-off defense laboratory, a contract laboratory spun-off from Stanford University, also in Palo Alto, which had been for a long time doing high-powered Pentagon studies of this or that type of laser. Then, when those contracts begin to dry up rather abruptly, some of the laser physicists, PhD physicists on staff like Harold Puthoff, Russell Targ begin applying their powers of investigation to Uri Geller and, in fact, find that he’s better than anyone thought, and these things can be explained using the new features of quantum mechanics. They published an article in Nature, Proceeding of the I.E.E.E., electrical engineering journals, and so on. They have a like-minded colleague and another PhD physicist, from the Bay Area, who is in touch with these individuals, Jack Sarfatti, who began publishing articles in places like Science News, and other mainstream outlets, trying to both report on and push forward the way to use the new ideas about quantum mechanics, non-locality in this case especially. Things like Bell’s Theorem, about which I’ll say more in a moment. Use those new features, at the foundations, the heart of quantum mechanics, to try to understand these otherwise surprising or unexpected results. So Sarfatti writes in a series of articles published in these mainstream news outlets, "the ambiguity in the interpretation of quantum mechanics leaves ample room for the possibility of psycho kinetic and telepathic affects." Why should we think that these are ruled out of court from the start? We learned all these mysterious and surprising things from quantum mechanics, and he goes on actually in a separate dispatch to say "My personal, professional judgment as a PhD physicist is that Uri Geller demonstrated genuine psycho energetic ability. [12:33]

Again, much more can be said about this and I’d be happy to in the question period if you’d like. If you’re looking for a different view, don’t, it turns out, look to the physicists, look to the magicians. So, James Randy, also known as The Amazing Randy, published one book on the debunking of Geller in the early ‘70’s, and followed up a few years later with a book called, Flim-Flam! And if you want to read one book, which is the most colorful debunking of all this stuff, I would suggest The Amazing Randy’s book. And he basically concludes, I think, quite rightly, "If you want to learn about possible effects of psychics and paranormal the last people you should ask to investigate that are physicists. They, as we know, are too arrogant to say they’re wrong and too gullible to capture things. Talk with a real magician." We all have our own opinions on that. [Laughter] So that’s just a quick overview of some, and again there’s wide tentacles stretching out from that kind of work. [13:27]

Again, I want to talk briefly about where these discussions are taking place. There’s an outcropping again in the mid ‘70’s, this sort-of low period otherwise for American physics, in terms of its sort of previous patterns. There start to be a series of discussions taking place that sort of crisscross boundaries we might have otherwise thought of as obviously mainstream or obviously fringe. Some of these are, I think, harder to place. One of the first of them starts taking place at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a nationally funded center of excellence of American physics. With, shall we say, less on their hands to do, a group of people started forming what they call the Fundamental Physics Group that met for a year. Now, of course they’re in the Bay Area, they receive regular reports from people like Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, who were participants in this group, from Jack Sarfatti, who by the way is pictured here, in the robe, and from other people, whose names we still now think of as sort of leading spirits in mainstream physics, like Henry Stapp, Phillippe Eberhard, Dieter Zeh, Geoffrey Chew, and so on. They’re all meeting together in one room every week for informal discussions. As it turns out, the meetings were open to the public and maybe Kenneth Krane can say more about what the public would have included from the streets of Berkeley in the mid 70’s. [Audience laughter] But by all accounts, there was a fascinating mix of types of people, with no sense of judgment implied by that. But there really were people coming off the streets and talking about all kinds of things. Including, can we use Bell’s Theorem to understand Uri Geller? Jack Sarfatti, again shown here, then had a spin-off group, also in San Francisco proper, which he called, "The Physics Consciousness Research Group." That attracted many of the same people. There was kind of a steady flow back and forth between those settings. Of course, they were close geographically and metaphysically. Again, the idea was, now we’ve learned a lot about submicroscopic processes, about connections that might defy our classical expectations between an object here and an object there. Might that explain the origins of consciousness and therefore the paranormal affects, like why I might have telepathic input from a person who’s not physically close to me? The person standing in the back here, Nick Herbert, when he moved from Berkeley to Boulder Creek, which is actually right near Big Sur, set up his own spin-off group called, "The Core Physics Technologium," which in some sense is still running, mostly as a web venture, as is Sarfatti’s group. They had similar discussions and similar participants. Finally, the Fundamental Physics Group from Berkeley began getting in their Volkswagen vans, and driving down the coast to the Esalen Institute shown here, where for ten years in a row they had a very intensive multi-week long study group on Bell’s Theorem and the foundations of quantum theory. Of all the study groups and like-minded groups at Esalen, this was the longest continuously running group, in Esalen’s history, devoted to the foundations of quantum mechanics. So again to show you here, this is obviously a playful photograph taken in 1975 of many of the people who were at the heart of all of these new developments. Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, who was involved in all these groups and also consulting to people at Esalen how this can help them with their human transformation projects, the human potential movements and so on. Fred Alan Wolf was involved in the same place as Nick Herbert, whom I mentioned earlier. Here they are. They were obviously all pals and hung out a lot together. They’d been roommates. Sarfatti and Wolf met because they were both teaching physics at San Diego State for many years, and then they moved up to the Bay Area and filled in with the other folks. This is at least a snapshot of new types of settings for this new work on the foundations of quantum mechanics with a twist. [17:31]

The National Science Foundation, having seen its budget slashed, especially for the physical sciences began declining proposals to test things like the latest, greatest efforts in quantum mechanics. There are movements to try to test, for example, whether or not hidden variables are in fact at play in the movement of subatomic objects around a laboratory. There were new ideas about which I can say more in a moment, new ideas to say, well might these effects be testable and not just sort-of argued about in a kind of philosophical mode? And the N.S.F. said, "Well, they might be but you won’t get the money from us." So, the experiments were funded by a series of private foundations. The Research Corporation, of course, had been founded many decades before and had long been in the business of funding mainstream academic scientific research, along with other private foundations. There starts to be a wider range of patrons that you see popping up in some of this work: The EST Foundation, I’ll say more about it in a moment, The Parapsychology Foundation, The Institute for Noetic Sciences, which was founded in Palo Alto. This last one was founded by the former astronaut, Edwin Mitchell, who argued when he came back to Earth that he’d had a mystical experience while in orbit and indeed there must be more than our philosophy has taken into account and was not being taken seriously; "I will therefore use my own personal finances to jumpstart research on Zen and quantum mechanics." For my purposes, the most important of this new set of patrons, and certainly most enthusiastic, is this gentleman, Werner Erhard. He was born Jack Rosenberg. There is much to be said. He made an amazing journey both geographically and beyond. He was a used car salesman in Philadelphia, who over a course of transformations, became a door-to-door traveling encyclopedia salesman in the Bay Area. And then finally emerged, and the name will perhaps be familiar to some in the room, as what can only be said to be the single most influential guru leader of what was called The Human Potential Movement in the United States. H was soon signing up hundreds of thousands of people to go through what was called EST, or Erhard Seminars Training, which was a sixty hour shock treatment where people yelled at you and then you were cured all your psychological problems. He still has many detractors, as well as many defenders. If you want evidence of how controversial he is look, at the Wikipedia site. It is officially under dispute, which you know means they’re all trying to get the story right. In any case, when he was abandoning his wife and four children in Philidelphia and making his move to California, he decided that Jack Rosenberg would be too easy to trace, he needed a new name. He took Werner, from our friend Werner Heisenberg. He’d always nurtured an interest in modern physics, and he said, "that’s a distinguished sounding name." Erhard was actually the German Chancellor of Finance at the time, so "that seems like an upstanding person you’d trust." So he became Werner Erhard, a.k.a. Jack Rosenberg from Philadelphia. [20:26]

Erhard is still at large, wanted for tax evasion, and there have been allegations of child molestation, which he actively denied. Certainly, you can fill in the blanks. What’s less known is that he was indeed among the most active patrons for this new physics. I’ll say more about that in a second. So from this heady brew of new settings, new topics and new patrons comes an explosion of books, many of which do quite well commercially. In fact, I couldn’t find the original covers of many of these on Google Images, so I had to do with second, third, fourth, even ninth editions because many of them are still in print and quite popular. The first two appeared in 1974. This one, Bob Toben was a high school buddy of Fred Alan Wolf, one of that quartet I’ve shown you before, who showed up with a book contract saying, "You tell me how this Uri Geller stuff works, we’ll make a killing," which they did. So, basically Bob tape-recorded discussions with Wolf and with Jack Sarfatti, that same individual I showed before, what does the new physics tell us about what’s possible? This actually became a cute cartoon guide to the new physics. This next book was actually one of the earliest in the imprint from the Esalen Foundation called, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist. The Tao of Physics came out in 1975. I’ll say more about that for the remainder of my talk. Capra was an active discussant in the Fundamental Physics Group and the Esalen workshops. He lead his own Esalen workshops, and so he’s coming very much from that corner. The Roots of Consciousness, is also now still in print. Mishlove was a graduate student at the time, in philosophy, at Berkeley. He fell in with that Fundamental Physics Group and Jack Sarfatti became his physics tutor and contributed a lengthy appendix to this book. Sarfatti is, in some sense, a coauthor. The Silent Pulse, from one of the leaders of The Human Potential Movement. Saul-Paul Sirag, another one of the quartet, was the behind-the-scenes physicist there. Again, a popular one many will know, Dancing Wu Li Masters. Gary Zukav was a science writer, not a scientist. He was one of the few who wasn’t actively involved in this, but he was participating in the Esalen workshops and basically over dinner at the big house at Big Sur, hatched the idea after sitting through some of these talks. He said "there’s a book here, let me write it." Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics, all about Jack Sarfatti. Fred Alan Wolf then began writing his own very popular books starting in the early ‘80’s. Nick Herbert as well. So some of these are by direct participants; others are sort of coached by those same people. [22:48]

I put this last cover up because, in the reviews of the time, they were widely reviewed and discussed in journals like Science and Physics Today, as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, and so on. They were invariably compared to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which had appeared in 1974, around the same time. Pirsig’s book was also reviewed very favorably in the magazine, Science, saying this was the most important commentary on the relation between science and society in generations. There was a notion that there’s a new thing happening and these physics-conscious books are at the forefront of it. Now, one might be tempted, as I had been, to say all this stuff is cute and funny and obviously separate from real physics. Right? This is clearly a fringe group who were colorful and had their heyday. I want to give us a little reason for pause before we just dismiss these otherwise quite wonderful stories. One way to gauge whether it’s real physics or not, we can argue about what the definition is, but one way is to ask what is happening in sort of mainstream physics as a result of this resurgent interest in the foundations of quantum theory, which is only beginning to grow again in this period of otherwise decline for the American physics profession? So, we look at for example, who is citing Bell’s Theorem. John Bell’s work, which had been published in 1964 in a very obscure journal in physics, and then lay sort of quiescent for a number of years , begins to get attention again only in the same period. Now these are citations in sort of the mainstream scientific journals - The Science Citation Index, not Dancing Wu Li Masters, and so on. This is within mainstream professional journals of science. Attention is growing not when it comes out, not when the first experiments are in fact conducted (citations drop in half the next year), but in fact only after these groups are up and running in the mid seventies. So that’s curious. Then we can say, well who’s publishing these articles? And in fact eighty six percent, of the U.S. based articles in this bulge are coming from the very same people who are meeting at Esalen, at Big Sur, and at Jack Sarfatti’s salon. And these are people who are taking up the serious study of Bell’s Theorem non-locality. Are we all connected? These are the people who are having the discussions funded by Werner Erhard. They’re going to discuss these things in these curious, perhaps entertaining settings. And then they’re going home and actually writing the only articles that are paying any attention to this at all. And just for those who might not be aware, this is striking to me because today Bell’s Theorem is at the absolute cutting edge of what we would consider the new quantum physics. It’s at the core of quantum computing, of quantum encryption, of quantum teleportation. It’s the whole notion of trying to understand very carefully these specific types of entangled states where shaking something here can indeed affect something over there. That is cutting edge, mainstream science, for which people now get lots of money, and it was being nursed along, while otherwise being ignored, by these groups in these particular settings in that low period. And if that’s not enough, not to dismiss the fringe, I include this photograph here, which might be hard to see. Erhard was so enamored of the new physics that he started up a second annual conference series, very lavishly funded, for other people to get involved who, finances being what they were, were not flourishing in their research budgets. So he got in touch with Sidney Coleman, a very renowned particle theorist at Harvard. Among his many honors, he was on my dissertation committee, but he doesn’t count that as most important. [Laughter]. We all have different takes. Anyway, Sidney is clearly a very important physicist. Roman Jackiw at M.I.T. as well. And Erhard says, "I want you guys talking on my dime with the condition that I get to come listen. I won’t say anything, I won’t make you physicists go through my special shock treatment training, just come to my huge house in San Francisco to talk about basic physics and let me listen." And they did. Here’s the second one with Steven Hawking, John Wheeler, and so on. So there is some sense in which this is hard to dismiss as merely fringe or fluffy stuff. [26:57]

I’ll talk briefly now about the last part of the talk; something that comes back to the last theme of textbooks. Let’s look at Fritjof Capra, shown here, around the time his book came out. He was born in Vienna, trained in Europe, and then did a post-doc in particle theory at U.C. Santa Cruz in the late ‘60’s. His appointment and visa ended, and he had to go back to Europe. He got a desk at Imperial College with no other source of income during the low period there. While he has a desk and he’s trying to make ends meet and pay the rent, he starts doing some low level mathematics tutoring, writing abstracts for the "Physikalische Berichte." And then he says, "I know how to make some cash. Just as Dmitri Mendeleev had said [audience laughs] a century before, I’ll write a textbook and that’ll solve all my problems." So he actually starts. He pulls together an outline for the book, it will be called "Current Concepts in Particle Physics." He has a chapter outline. He begins writing sample chapters. He sends some of these to Viki Weisskopf at MIT - by this point, a renowned textbook author, former director of CERN, popular science writer, whom he’d met in person at a summer school previously. He says, "here’s my plan, here are chapters and by the way, can you help me line up a publisher?" Viki of course, was very successful. "I need to get an advance, you know I can’t eat past next week. Can you please advise me?" So Viki wrote back, "I like your style, I find many things well expressed, having read some sample chapters. I would again encourage you to go ahead and finish the manuscript. I understand your need for financial support, but I suppose you are aware of the fact that a book like this is not going to bring in much money because of the nature of the subject. The best that one can hope is something like a thousand dollars the first year and less thereafter." And again, Kenneth Krane can give us a reality check on that, what might a textbook author hope for in terms of staying afloat. The letters continue. Capra then recalls that soon before he left Santa Cruz, he had a mystical experience sitting on the beach. Now, that never happened in Santa Cruz before. [laughter] With the encouragement of his department chair, Michael Nauenberg, who is well known to many of us - Michael has been very active in history science for many years as well. Nauenberg, whom Capra calls a rather "hard headed and pragmatic physicist," says he should go ahead and follow that mystical bent. "You should change your plans, don’t write a textbook that no one needs. Write a sort of different style book comparing modern physics and eastern mysticism." One thing leads to another and the book comes out in ‘75, having been rejected by a number of presses. It goes on to sell 150,000 copies in the U.S. alone in just under two years. By now, it’s continued to gallop along. Capra and Viki met up again in California soon after the book had come out. Capra gave a copy to Weisskopf saying, "You may recall you helped out so much early on," and Viki read it on the plane flight back from California, back to Boston. "I read a good part of your book during the flight back and I liked it very much. It is very hard for me to judge if you have succeeded in your task since it addresses itself to a more specific kind of public than we find here in the east." Translation: We have no hippies at MIT [audience laughter]. "I do believe, however, that it is a good book and that there will be many people who will have a better idea of physics after they have read it." By that point, he’s addressing it to, "Dear Fritjof," not "Dear Dr. Capra." The letters in return are "Dear Viki" not "Dear Senior Professor," and so on. [30:16]

Now, that’s Capra, in very wide circles continuing in print today. My last comment here is, what, does this have to do with scientific textbooks, which after all, was Mary Jo’s assignment to me. [Audio cuts out 30:27 – 30:29]. So the book was praised when it came out, as well as in the New York Times and so on, it was praised in Physics Today, the sort of trade journal for practicing physicists in the United States. Not only did the reviewer, who was a professor of astronomy and physics at Cornell, say it got the physics right – Capra was, after all, a PhD and post-doc-trained particle theorist – but it couched the physics in, "the immediate, feeling-oriented vision of the mystic that is so attractive to many of our best students." Here, we begin to recall that second photograph of Feynman with his students with the long hair and their feet on the desk. This is a moment when anything at all that can get students back in the physics classrooms is perhaps to be not dismissed lightly. It also begins to get talked about in a different way in the American Journal of Physics. Unlike Physics Today, this journal specializes in pedagogical issues. It’s the official publication of the American Association of Physics Teachers, so it’s all about teaching physics at all levels. You start seeing articles popping up about whole courses in which The Tao of Physics is literally the textbook for the course. Some of those are what we would now call "physics for poets" courses, aimed at the non-science student to get them in and take a general education course. In fact, some of the courses are aimed at physics majors, genuine physics students, to get and perhaps keep them in the departments. When there’s some pushback – there’s a whole debate that erupts in the pages of American Journal of Physics – one of the original enthusiasts says "Well, it should be emphasized that most of these students would not have taken an offering in the physics department if it were not this one." The same author, David Harrison, who’s still active, wrote an email to me recently, in which he said more prosaically, "I was the only one getting butts in the chairs. How dare they attack me. No one was going to take physics, but for this. [32:10]

So let me conclude. We have a standard account now for many years that the counterculture and what brought in a new age in the United States, was vehemently against science. This was an anti-science movement. That’s the original characterization of the counterculture by the social-scientist Theodore Roszak. The whole book is organized as the flight from western science. That account has been more or less adopted in this new generation of mainstream American historians who are now setting their sights on the ‘70’s. We see that time and again, the hippies and what they turned into, whatever they were, weren’t interested in science. In fact, if we start taking this broader view, we see that quantum mechanics and some of the genuinely hot issues like Bell’s theorem, served as intellectual anchors for many of these New Age speculations. I should mention that Werner Erhard actually had that same quartet of physicists - Sarfatti, Wolf, and so on - training Erhard’s own trainers in the new world view offered by quantum mechanics. So, the people who then go into a room and cure everyone else’s ills because they would get in touch and tune in and drop out, the trainers had to be coached in quantum mechanics before they go in the room, by these people. This is not a passing interest. And in fact these New Age institutions like Esalen were very eager and quite effective patrons of the new physics, and in turn this work - with all the things that might indeed make us chuckle today - helped very concretely to bring foundational topics back into the scratchpads and the blackboards of U.S. physics classrooms. Thank you. [Applause] I hope I didn’t go too long. [33:53]

Mary Jo Nye: Let me ask if there are a couple of questions for Dave? Go ahead. [34:00]

Audience member: I want to recommend to you maybe a larger phenomenon than this last one you were talking about and that is one that I thought I witnessed. I lived through this period and I what witnessed in the early 70’s in Northern California, and that was most of the mainstream media had decided an enemy were the college age students.

David Kaiser: Yes.

Audience member: They were a great danger to society, themselves and every else and now they’ve decided it’s the Internet that’s the big danger to all of us.

David Kaiser: Yes.

Audience member: And as a consequence, there appeared on covers of magazines and newspapers and so on, articles describing these things that I had taught in the 70’s, the 60’s who I thought were the very best and healthiest, describing them as "sickies..

David Kaiser: Yes.

Audience Member: They had to survive and, in the 70’s, I began to listen to them talking about their near survival, and so on.

David Kaiser: Yes.

Audience member: So I think this drove them out of the physics classroom and that this is the larger phenomenon that includes what you… [35:08]

David Kaiser: Yeah. Again, because I’ve used up so much time, I will just say that I agree very strongly with you. Things I left out but point to that direction. Capra himself was a post-doc in Paris during the May ‘68 student uprisings and that clearly was very influential for him, and he writes about that, years later. Many of the physicists that I’m talking about here said similar things. Some of the young students had to prove they weren’t the "stooges of the Pentagon." Remember, this is years into the slog of the Vietnam war, the whole notion of what it means to be an American physicist was going through a very serious change here. This was seen by some people as one way to announce their allegiance to other ways of doing physics and being in the world. Capra, when he was in Santa Cruz, at least in his own recollections, says that basically he was like a character in an after-school special: He was a particle physicist by day and a strung out hippie by night, very much in what he considered the student culture, students who were quite a bit younger than him. But he says very similar things, and that this is his source of vitality. I think there is the tie-in to a kind of youth culture both venerated and I agree, so demonized is in the background here as well. I think that’s right. [36:13]

Mary Jo Nye: One more question. Fred.

Fred: In the late 70’s and early 80’s, the person who turned everything around for physics was Carl Sagan. The number of students who decided to major in physics because they watched him on television was absolutely extraordinary. It had nothing to do with particle physics. It had to do with cosmology. [36:37]

David Kaiser: Yes. I agree. Two quick thoughts. At this point the particle physicists were doing cosmology, for many of the reasons that you say. I’ve written about this as well. In the period when they couldn’t keep doing bigger and bigger smashing things, they began to say, "Oh, we have a free laboratory in the cosmos." So there’s an intertwining there. But I take your point. More importantly, I left out that this curve repeats itself. It reaches an equal peak under the Reagan era defense buildup and then crashes not as quickly but in the same magnitude at the end of the Cold War. Part of what you’re describing is a confound. Sagan was no doubt extraordinarily influential here as many others were, but also there was a huge rebound starting in the early 80’s, where it literally reached the same late 60’s peak. So you see a second bubble, a second sort of stock market cycle. But I agree with you. That’s right. [37:24]

Mary Jo Nye: I think we’ll go on to the next speaker and we should have some time for discussion afterwards I hope. Thanks so much.

David Kaiser: Thank you. [Applause] [37:30]

 

Watch Other Videos

Session I: Scientists and Textbooks

Session 2: Popular and Public Science

Session 3: The Scientist as Public Citizen

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