David Kaiser

American physicist and historian of science at MIT, known for books including How the Hippies Saved Physics, Drawing Theories Apart, and Quantum Legacies.

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  1. 1. How The Hippies Saved Physics

    Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

    In the 1970s, a band of young Bay Area physicists steeped in counterculture revived serious debate about quantum weirdness—entanglement, nonlocality, and the measurement problem—at a time when mainstream academia largely dismissed such topics. Through the freewheeling activities of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, including flirtations with ESP and consciousness studies, they kept foundational questions alive and inadvertently spurred key advances such as no‑cloning arguments and renewed tests of Bell’s theorem that later fed into quantum information science. The narrative blends Cold War politics, funding shifts, and hippie-era exuberance to show how fringe curiosity helped reshape the core of modern physics.

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