How the Hippies stored physics

An outline that I wrote of how David Kaiser of the Hippies stored physics is now available from the American scientist. A short summary is that I think it's a wonderful book, tell in well researched and entertaining a story that I've always wanted to know more about fashion. I am not convinced by the main argument of the title, that this group of people "Physics saved", rescuing a suffocating ideology "shut up and calculate" by the road to the importance of the theorem of Bell's tones and help start the field of quantum information theory. Maybe emulates the author just his subjects, known for their playful outlandishness.

There are quite a few interesting things I learned from the book that didn't make it in the review. An example is the story of the (of EST fame) Werner Erhard theoretical physics conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s, organised in collaboration with Sydney Coleman and Roman Jackiw. One of the factors that these events put an end to was the advent of string theory: it was felt that no string theory Conference without attending the whites would be taken seriously, and then nothing wanted to Whiten with EST and its founder (although he had attended, with the likes of Feynman and Weinberg, the earliest Conference in the series back in 1977).

If you do find interesting this topic, I highly recommend the book.

For a different take on the same subject, one of the main participants, is Jack Sarfatti memoirs Stargate free available these days in a pre-publication version here.

I'm afraid that my own description of where the physicists described in the Kaiser would not book ended the field of quantum information theory, but the much larger quagmire of dubious claims about quantum physics which is still very influential. For example, this week at the AAAS meeting in San Diego there is a session on Quantum Retrocausation is, see this listing from the world of parapsychology.

Update: I must also mention that Chad Orzel the book discusses here and here.