Quantum Physics and Beyond

"The Fundamental Fysiks Group included many colorful characters such as Fritjof Capra, author of the bestselling The Tao of Physics and an entire series of green/ecological/New Age books since the 1970s, Fred Alan Wolf, Nick Herbert, and Jack Sarfatti (to name only a few). Members of the group secured backing from such improbable sources as New Age human potential guru Werner Erhard and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They also sponsored succesful workshops on their brand of quantum mechanics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California complete with naked coed hot tubbing.

A major theme of the book is the near total eclipse of philosophy and foundational issues in physics, especially in the United States, following World War II. The title of the first chapter is the infamous phrase “Shut Up and Calculate,” allegedly addressed to young physicists by their professors. Kaiser discusses how philosophical discussions of the meaning and foundations of quantum mechanics (and other parts of physics as well) were systematically eliminated from textbooks and training in physics in the United States during the 1950s. Many journals had either explicit or implicit policies of rejecting any  papers discussing these issues. Thus, many key papers by Bell and members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group were originally published in obscure journals.

The members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, on the other hand, wanted to understand the meaning and conceptual basis of quantum mechanics. The same appears to have been true of the late John Bell, the author of Bell’s Theorem. If quantum encryption and quantum computing prove practical, then the real world consequences of these philosophical questionings may prove great indeed. For the most part, however, the actual mathematics used to express these concepts is first and second year college algebra and calculus, nothing like the exotic mathematics of string theory or quantum field theory (QFT).

If the book has a major weakness, it is that the book is very cautious in addressing parapsychology, the occult, the involvement of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and the many bizarre elements of the story, all of which overlap strongly. Kaiser appears to stick carefully to what he can clearly document and to avoid taking a definite position, let alone speculating, on the many controversial issues that arise during his book. His focus is the eventual impact on mainstream, public, unclassifed physics research today. It is perhaps worth noting that the National Security Agency (NSA) and other “members of the intelligence community” appear to be the principal sources of the downpour of funding for quantum information sciences, quantum encryption, and quantum computing, an amount of money far in excess of the few millions garnered by the research in the 1970′s that Kaiser discusses."

http://math-blog.com/2012/04/02/how-the-hippies-saved-physics-book-review/

How the Hippies Saved Physics Book Review
math-blog.com
Mathematics is wonderful!

Kaiser’s book has triggered a new effort to re-examine the no-entanglement signaling “theorems” using macroscopically distinguishable non-orthogonal Glauber coherent states not only on theoretical grounds but because of the data on retrocausality - most recently that of Cornell professor Daryl Bem backing up earlier claims of Dick Bierman, Dean Radin and others on seeming advanced signals in the living brain. See the two retrocausality workshops held at the University of San Diego organized by Daniel Sheehan for the AAAS in 2006 and 2011 as I recall.