HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser (the Atom cover was the closest to a physics image I had handy) argues that when the pre-WW II physics community pondered quantum physics, they wondered what it could all mean. Then the Manhattan Project and the push for applied science in the Cold War provided a rush of funding but for practical, applied physics — don’t worry about how the weirdness of subatomic particles makes sense, just crunch numbers!
By the 1960s, funding was dwindling. A new crop of researchers interested in Eastern mysticism and parapsychology began looking at how it all fit together — could Bell’s Theorem that electrons could interact somehow at a distance explain psi-powers like Uri Geller? This drew attention and funding from everyone from the CIA to EST-founder Werner Erhard; in the end, the wild new ideas didn’t lead to anything but they did spark fresh interest in asking “how does it work?”
The idea all of this saved physics is a bit of a stretch. I had a bigger problem in that it’s focused more on the researchers’ counter-culture lives (hanging out at Esalen, attending EST workshops) and I wanted more of the wild physics (quantum mechanics and nonlocality really are weird, wild shit). So a disappointment.
Happily looking for that book in the library catalog introduced me to the more interesting HIPPIE FOOD: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kauffman
Kauffman takes us back to the days when soup came in cans, white bread, white rice and white flour were the norm, and cereal was full of sugar. In the 1960s and 1970s, stuff I can now find in Publix or Harris Teeter, such as granola or tofu, were weird, exotic and not terribly appealing.
Change came from a variety of sources, even before the hippies were a thing. Pre-WW II, health reformers and mystic were touting the benefits of fresh food over canned and whole wheat flour over white, though as with The Great American Medicine Show, the sensible advice was mixed in with crackpot ideas and assurances about achieving perfect health (balance yin and yang in your diet and you’ll never get sick!). In the hippie age these ideas really flourished as food co-ops, anti-capitalists and farmers growing something called “organic vegetables” embraced similar ideas. This time they caught on. However the dreams of transforming agribusiness didn’t come to pass: instead, the capitalist system incorporated the ideas and foods and kept going. Many ventures found they had to turn a profit to keep operating; back-to-the-land advocates discovered that when crops fail due to storms or weather, you get very hungry. More informative than the physics book and occasionally amusing (some of the debates over how to proceed remind me of political arguments in college).
All rights to images remain with current holders. Atom cover by Gil Kane.
