Hippies and scientists are generally regarded as polar opposites, but Dr. David Kaiser argues that they can come together. In fact, he says that hippies SAVED physics. Dr. David Kaiser is a man who has written many books, has two Ph.D.s, and is the Department Head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He came to speak at Stevens on February 4, and as a testament to his immense knowledge, convinced a room of people that LSD and quantum physics can in fact get along.
When hearing about quantum physics, generally people think of particles, not peace. But Dr. Kaiser came to Stevens Institute of Technology to talk about his book, How Hippies Saved Physics, and explained the fascinating tie between the two. He was introduced by Dr. Alex Wellerstein, a Science and Technology professor at Stevens who has known Kaiser for over ten years and claims to be a major contender for “biggest fan of his in the whole wide world.”
Dr. Kaiser started off his lecture by talking about quantum encryption, and how it differs from encryption that regularly occurs by encoding messages using large prime numbers that are hard for computers to factor. Quantum encryption, he said, is a transfer “protected by nature”, as hacking a quantum encrypted transfer will destroy the signal itself.
Who came up with quantum encryption? Short answer, hippies. Long answer? Dr. Kaiser told the story of the “Fundamental Fysiks Group”, a group founded in 1975 by Ph.D students from Berkeley who graduated just as the physics job market crashed. Physics at the time was not creative; and was accurately summed up by the phrase, “Shut up and calculate”. This group would meet every Friday afternoon and talk about physics.
Both young and very smart, this group of freethinkers pondered quantum mysticism and adopted Bell’s theorem early on, which says that regardless of the coordination of particles, the outcome of two separate particles correlate more than half of the time. If these quantum entangled particles can coordinate without sending messages to each other, they began to argue, then what’s to say it can’t be applied to humans’ consciousness and unlock ESP within the human mind?
The idea of mental powers, which now sounds absurd, garnered national interest quickly. Why? Kaiser put it eloquently, “in 1972…we loved that stuff”. Reputable magazines like Time published articles on this quantum physics meets parapsychology, because of how fascinating a subject it was. The CIA thought so too; in 1979 alone they spent $1 million ($3 million adjusted for inflation) to research the subject, because having a guy sit in a room high on LSD is much safer than having a spy in Soviet territory. An institute was founded at the height of the theory’s popularity, where these physicists would partake in psychedelics and enjoy clothing-optional hot tub parties on the California shoreline while they thought about quantum mechanics.
By stepping far out of the traditional, rigid view of physics, a bunch of hippies made productive mistakes that brought about quantum entanglement and breakthroughs in quantum information science, and in turn saved physics from its old, close-minded way of thinking.
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