Though many factors contribute to how we interpret the world around us, its fundamentals and its ecology, the giants of history that preceded us and the culture that inculcated us are the two most influential forces shaping our worldview. Without the former, entire schools of thought would be foreign to us, compelling each generation to form every idea, to summon every insight. Even so, we would be even more lost without the latter. For with no cultural influences to narrow our focus, to distinguish for us the important from the trivial, the vital from the dormant, we would have no common ground upon which to share our observations, our revelations, or our proofs. A society that cares about freedom inspires research into the forces which bring it about. Conversely, a society that does not care about the rights of women is hardly going to encourage the opening of womens colleges. Everything we are is shaped by what we know and how we've been taught and this is the fascinating lesson Mr. Kaiser successfully communicates in this history of quantum physics.
Quantum physics is a mysterious and troublesome discipline. As much as it explains about the universe, it generates just as many puzzles, causing intellectual giants no less than Albert Einstein to throw up their hands in surrender and disgust. How can the state of something be undefined until its observation compels it to collapse into an outcome? How can the simple observation of a thing change its destiny? These seem like questions as much for philosophers as physicists. No surprise then that the founders and shapers of the field, Neils Bohr, Max Born and John Bell, were freethinking, European physicists whose early-20th-century insights drew together the spiritual and the physical to lay down the fundamentals for a field of study that shaped theoretical physics for the remainder of the century.
For as much as these men launched a thousand experiments, the study of physics is not cheap. Considerable funding is required if theories are to be transformed into reality. And so, as the century bogged down in war, both the hot and the cold, the non-dogmatic ideas of the early decades gave way to the narrowminded and coldly mathematical formulas of the latter, for the research grants flowing from western governments were concerned with military certainties, not intellectual ephemera. This constricted view of physics held sway until the countercultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, decades which produced as much academic change as social transformation. No longer did young scientists feel outcast for marrying the metaphysical with the real. They were free to form clubs, write papers, and imagine experiments that crossed disciplines in ways considered verboten only years prior. And in this, they sparked a rediscovery of earlier ideas of quantum physics, applied new insights and new outcomes to them and, in the process, revitalized and reshaped the study of a discipline that has the potential to change our understanding of the universe. Not bad for a bunch of California stoners who, at any other time in that long and difficult century, would have been shackled by the rigors of stolid academia.
Though Mr. Kaiser has overreached with his title, How The Hippies Saved Physics is an energetic jaunt through the last 50 years of the study of quantum physics: the wars that stunted it, the governments that funded it, and especially the countercultural minds that bent themselves to its challenges. No, the author does not convince that his club of California hippies saved physics; in fact, their most memorable contributions seem confined to the popularization of the work of John Bell and advancements in the field of quantum information. And while both are discussed in detail and each hold considerable promise, they fall short of being called saviors. This aside, Mr. Kaiser has penned a potent piece about a fascinating collection of kooks and freethinkers, eccentrics and geniuses, who helped to broaden the horizons of physics. And the extent to which he distills complex theories into notions understandable by the layman is both admirable and educational.
But for the oversell, this is valuable work that reminds us of the dangers of dogma. Scientific endeavor should not have any sacred cows. Science is the pursuit of truth and knowledge. There is no room for cultural or governmental biases. Knowledge is knowledge. And here, Mr. Kaiser does a wonderful job illustrating this most enduring principle. (4/5 Stars)
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