How the Hippies (kind of) Saved Physics and how everything is connected

I just stumbled upon a really neat little tidbit of history, that actually ties together a lot of different people whom I've had thoughts about over the years, some because I knew them personally, some because I heard things about them that were interesting (some good and bad), some whom I've only met once or twice. But the weird thing is, I never realized how closely connected all these different people are, and it as it slowly dawned on me I realized I had to make a post about all of these interconnections.

Where to start? Well, earlier this year, I went to a wedding in Atlanta, where a friend I hadn't seen in many years started asking me some things about physics. He mentioned that he was reading "The Quantum Enigma" and I immediately let out a groan, and mentally did a "palm-face" kind of thing. I then explained that this was written by two guys, Bruce and Fred, whom I knew well, but they were both idiots and I'd told them to their face that I didn't agree with the basic premise of their book, and my advisor had given a whole lecture retaliating against their accusations that the physics community is hiding "skeletons in the closet" regarding the role of consciousness in physics (which they launched at the weekly seminar preceding his lecture the following week). The two other professors at UC Santa Cruz who spoke out against Bruce and Fred before and after my advisor on that same day, were Anthony Aguirre (one of the founders of the FQXi institute mentioned in the How the Hippies Saved Physics video below) and Michael Nauenberg (who is mentioned by name several times in the video below, and was apparently the person who suggested to Fritjoff Capra while he was a postdoc at my school that he write a book mixing quantum mechanics with Eastern mysticism--one of the many things I had no idea about until seeing this video). I know Nauenberg mostly as a crotchety old man who we call "The Santa Cruz Heckler" because he heckles any string theorists or cosmologists who ever give talks, telling them they aren't real scientists and repeatedly asking "what's the physical meaning of this?". I think the one and only occasion where I've ever agreed with anything that's come out of Nauenberg's mouth was when he shot down Bruce and Fred--although I think everyone present would agree that my advisor did a much better job of that. Wikipedia's entry on "quantum mysticism" says that it was primarily Fritjoff Capra's "The Tao of Physics" that started the whole quantum mysticism movement, and got the new age community interested in quantum mechanics--that I was vaguely aware of.

Anyway, I explained to my friend that Fred is just this obnoxious lab manager who wishes he were a real physicist, and Bruce is this kind but really senile old guy who at some point earlier in his career was an atomic physicist, but doesn't understand quantum mechanics (let alone consciousness) any better than Fred. I once watched Bruce debate an undergrad philosophy major about the nature of consciousness in front of an audience of myself and a bunch of undergrad SPS club members, and it was really sad to watch because the undergrad utterly destroyed him, as Bruce didn't know the first thing about consciousness and had all of these silly naive ideas about free will.

After explaining this, he naturally asked me "ok, well yeah... I kind of thought some of the book sounded a little kooky, but I wasn't sure. So who *should* I read if I want to read a really deep book about physics? Who would you recommend?" I thought for only a moment and then said "this is going to sound strange, because I haven't read it, but I think the book I would recommend the most is Leonard Susskind's book The Black Hole War : My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. It's funny, I somehow *knew* this was the best popular book on physics out there, even though I hadn't read it. My intuition was that it would be from a combination of things--one, Leonard Susskind is one of the deepest and most intelligent thinkers in physics, and always explains things in a very interesting way that exposes the philosophical importance of the ideas, not just the math behind it. He has razor sharp intellect as well as wit. He also explains things in a very down to earth way, that makes complicated things just make simple sense--he cuts right to the important stuff. Also, when he published that book, he wrote another book called An Introduction to Black Holes, Information, and the String Theory Revolution : The Holographic Universe on the same topic, but including all the math and intended for physicists, and that one I did read and found it outstanding. My impression was that the content was similar, but the Black Hole War was written at a level that anyone should be able to understand, whereas the one I read has a lot of stuff that only a physicist would be able to make sense of.

So, I started listening to The Black Hole War on books on tape yesterday. I've only listened to the prologue and Chapter 1, but to my great delight it appears to be everything I'd hoped it would be and more--the ultimate popular book on physics, that both gets things right and exposes what's interesting and deep about physics without watering it down too much. But the best thing about the book that I hadn't realized is that it tells a lot more of the human story behind it than his other book. So it's not just redundant with what I've already read (so far at least).

The First Chapter of the book is about a series of secret meetings that he attended with Hawking (where the famous battle over black holes known as "The Information Paradox" all began) in the upstairs of the house of a guy named Werner Erhard, who ran an organization known as EST (Erhard Seminar Training) and was filthy rich and loved to invite high profile physicists over to his house to have deep conversations. He mentions 3 or 4 regular attenders including Hawking and himself, Savas Dimopolous (whom I've met a few times, my advisor having introduced us) and--to my surprise--David Finkelstein, whom he mentions twice. I knew that Lenny was friends with my advisor (Tom Banks) and figured he would surely mention him in the book, and I wasn't surprised at all that Dimopolous was in there too, since he works at Stanford with Susskind. But I was not at ALL expecting him to start the book off by mentioning (twice in Chapter 1) David Finkelstein, someone who had an enormous personal impact on my life. It may or may not be an exaggeration to say that taking David Finkelstein's Quantum Relativity class with ikioi at Georgia Tech in 1998 was what convinced me to major in physics. But it's not at all an exaggeration to say that he's the man who convinced me that Ayn Rand was wrong and to officially renounce my faith in Objectivism, after ikioi and I invited him to give a talk called "Quantum Objectivism" for our Students of Objectivism club and had dinner with him afterwards. Also, the reason I bought the domain name "spoonless.net" in 1999 (which I've owned for the past 12 years) and adopted "spoonless" as my username is about half related to Finkelstein (in particular his antirealist views on quantum mechanics, which I was fascinated by at the time, later departed from, and now have drifted somewhat back towards) and half related to other things.

So after getting home and googling for this self help guru's name, Werner Erhard, I found more and more additional connections between people that I had never realized were there. Also, before I get to that, let me mention that Landmark Education (which I've met a lot of people who have been involved with, and were in part the inspiration for a circle of friends I spend a lot of time with, called FreedomCommunity) apparently was a direct spinoff of Erhard Seminar Training. And furthermore, the Church of Scientology launched a campaign against him after he allegedly stole a lot of their methods and incorporated them into his own (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_Werner_Erhard).

After reeling from that a bit, then the real fun started once I found Jack Sarfatti's final blog entry at his blog "Destiny Matrix":

http://destinymatrix.blogspot.com/

I had never heard of Jack Sarfatti either, but in his blog post he ties a ton of people I've known or heard about all together, which totally blows my mind. Here are some experps from it:

"Both Fred [Alan Wolf] and I got divorced about same time ~ 1971 and we were room mates. I was too young for that job and was bored and wanted adventure which came soon enough from the CIA with the strange events in 1973 at SRI Remote Viewing Project described in my book" [Fred Alan Wolf is one of the main crazy guys interviewed in What the Bleep Do We Know, along with John Hagelin (also crazy) and David Albert (not crazy at all, but sued them for distorting his words). (On a side note, I found a picture of my advisor somewhere online arm in arm with David Albert at a conference they were at together on the Arrow of Time.)]

"My encounter with Dennis Bardens of British Intelligence in 1974: 'Dr Sarfatti, it is my duty to inform you of a psychic war raging across the continents between the Soviet Union and your country and you are to be in the thick of it.'

"The main thing we did was the Esalen Month in Jan 1976 I think that Gary Zukav writes about in Dancing Wu Li Masters. I brought David Finkelstein there and that's how he met Werner Erhard leading to the big est physics conferences described by Lenny Susskind with Feynman, Gell-Mann, Wheeler, Hawking, Coleman, I think Kip Thorne et-al. I had met David at Yeshiva visiting Lenny Susskind. Finkelstein also worked with Ken Shoulders and Hal Puthoff at a company set up by the Fried Chicken guy William Church as a result of the Esalen month.
We had seminars at the facility on Nob Hill with the Rockefeller-Lanier money."

"I asked Werner in the lobby of the Ritz, he in a silly inappropriate casual outfit, with a woman adorer, what he did. He said "I make people happy." I wanted to run and I said in a strong Brooklyn accent, "I think you're an asshole." Werner got up from his chair a big smile, embraced me warmly and said "I am going to give you money." I had no idea about the message of the est-Training being "You're an asshole." Werner thought I was some kind of Guru I guess."

"Yes. I gave Fritjof $1500 that he needed to pay his lawyer for a Green Card. I also brought my then room-mate Gary Zukav to Esalen and wrote all of the rough draft of the physics parts of Wu Li Masters for him and helped him with the editing in later drafts."

"George was a "spook" who managed Tim Leary when Nixon let him out of prison."

"Indeed Nick Herbert's FLASH paper led to the no-cloning theorem so important in quantum computing today."

"Fred Wolf and I were edged out probably because they thought we were too crazy? Finkelstein sort of took over and I was the guy who brought him there in the first place. It was the usual academic shark cut-throat back-stabbing both Fred & I left SDSU for."

"I am cc'ing this to some of the participants who I am still in touch with. Fred Wolf recently spoke to Werner who now lives in London. I also ran into Stan Klein only a few days ago who is doing very interesting brain research with Stapp. I think Fritjof Capra is still in Berkeley and Stan Klein is in touch with him. Unfortunately Tim Leary, George Koopman and Robert Anton Wilson have died. I think Gary Zukav lives on Mount Shasta. You should also talk to David Finkelstein."


It turns out, this whole post is an interview he did a couple years ago with a science historian at MIT named David Kaiser, who was writing a book called "How the Hippies Saved Physics". Here is a lecture he gave at MIT on the book, it sounds really good! And he mentions even more people I know...

http://forum-network.org/lecture/how-hippies-saved-physics

After watching this video, lots more became clear to me. He talks about FQXI, which Anthony Agueirre helped found and Garrett Lisi, a personal friend of mine, who used to have an active lj here, was one of the main initial recipients of their funding. Both Jack Sarfatti in his blog and this guy in the video also mention Garrett.

Nick Herbert, whom they both talk about a lot, happens to be another guy whom I have met personally. Actually that's a funny story, I met him in Robert Anton Wilson's apartment, actually I think when we shook hands we were just walking in together.

Sarfatti it seems is clearly one of the crazy guys, similar to the What the Bleep people, but Nick Herbert is sort of borderline. Like Capra, he's kind of halfway crazy, and exaggerates a lot of things, but at least seems like he understands some physics, like Bruce and Fred. But I don't think he has that great of a grasp on it, personally. One thing that annoys me in the video, that I disagree with, is the premise. The main premise seems to be that, since Nick Herbert (one of the "Hippies") was able to get a paper published saying that he thought he could send communications faster than light... and that since that prompted a real physicist to respond by proving that you couldn't, that they contributed greatly to physics. While that may be true in a sense, the way I interpret it is more that everyone knew you couldn't do that, but the fact that a bunch of annoying new agers went to the trouble of trying to claim that you could, this made it worth proving that you couldn't. But it did attract more attention to Quantum Information, which overall is a good thing. He sort of glosses over the fact that what the hippies contributed was just that they were totally wrong.

I found this paper online, which was written a couple years ago by the referee who approved Nick Herbert's paper for publication... defending his decision to do it, since many physicists think it was never worthy of publication...
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205076
"Abstract: I was the referee who approved the publication of Nick Herbert's FLASH paper, knowing perfectly well that it was wrong. I explain why my decision was the correct one, and I briefly review the progress to which it led."

"Early in 1981, the editor of Foundations of Physics asked me to be
a referee for a manuscript by Nick Herbert, with title “FLASH —A superluminal communicator based
upon a new kind of measurement.” It was obvious to me that the paper could not be correct, because it
violated the special theory of relativity. However I was sure this was also obvious to the author. Anyway,
nothing in the argument had any relation to relativity, so that the error had to be elsewhere."

(Incidentally, I do think Nick is a very entertaining guy, he's a real fun person to hang out with. I just wouldn't expect him to come up with any interesting ideas in physics. Nor would I ever expect Jack Sarfatti or Fred Alan Wolf to)

Oh, and the How the Hippies Saved Physics guy also talks a lot about Esalen, which is a place various friends of mine have visited, and where some have worked. Apparently lots of these people used to hang out there, and they eventually got Richard Feynman to come. I also think I remember Susskind mentioning that Feynman came to some of those secret meetings at Werner Erhard's house, because there was some story about ordering a Feynman sandwich he tells... where he asks Feynman what a Feynman sandwich would be like and Feynman says "it's like a Susskind sandwich but with less ham." And then Susskind replies "but at least a Susskind sandwich has less baloney." He mentions that that was the only time he remembers one-upping Feynman in terms of wit. I can't remember for sure if this was at Erhard's house but I think so.

At the end of Susskind's first chapter in The Black Hole War, he goes home from the meeting with Hawking where Hawking first told him that he thought information would be completely erased in black holes, and even that information was being erased all of the time in empty space due to microscopic virtual black holes. And he says "as soon as I got back, I went to my friend Tom Banks and we talked about it, and eventually figured out why it bothered us so much... erasing information means increasing entropy, which means you end up producing a lot of heat!" Soon after that, they published a paper arguing that Hawking's proposal violated the laws of thermodynamics, which was the first shot fired in the great war (which Hawking eventually conceded, although not until several decades later--in fact, he conceded it while I was in graduate school, just before I started working with Tom Banks, a couple years before Lenny wrote the book).