The Fundamental Fysiks Group was founded in San Francisco in May 1975 by two physicists,

Elizabeth Rauscher Elizabeth A. Rauscher (1937-2019) was an American physicist and parapsychologist. She was born in Berkeley, California on March 18, 1937. She died on July 3, 2019 (aged 82). She was a former researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laborat ...

and George Weissmann, at the time both graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The group held informal discussions on Friday afternoons to explore the philosophical implications of quantum theory. Leading members included Fritjof Capra, John Clauser, Philippe Eberhard,

Nick Herbert Nicholas Le Quesne Herbert, Baron Herbert of South Downs, (born 7 April 1963) is a British Conservative Party politician and was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Arundel and South Downs from 2005 to 2019. He was Minister of State for Police ...

, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Henry Stapp, and Fred Alan Wolf. David Kaiser argues, in ''How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival'' (2011), that the group's meetings and papers helped to nurture the ideas in quantum physics that came to form the basis of quantum information science. Two reviewers wrote that Kaiser may have exaggerated the group's influence on the future of physics research, though one of them,

Silvan Schweber Silvan Samuel Schweber (10 April 1928 in Strasbourg – 14 May 2017) was a French-born American theoretical physicist and historian of science. Biography In 1944 Schweber began to study chemistry at the City College of New York and in 1947 moved t ...

, wrote that some of the group's contributions are easy to identify, such as Clauser's experimental evidence for non-locality attracting a share of the Wolf Prize in 2010, and the publication of Capra's ''

The Tao of Physics ''The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism'' is a 1975 book by physicist Fritjof Capra. A bestseller in the United States, it has been translated into 23 languages. Capra summarized his m ...

'' (1975) and Gary Zukav's '' The Dancing Wu Li Masters'' (1979) attracting the interest of a wider audience. Kaiser writes that the group were "very smart and very playful", discussing quantum mysticism and becoming local celebrities in the Bay Area's counterculture. When

Francis Ford Coppola Francis Ford Coppola (; ; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the major figures of the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Coppola is the recipient of five A ...

bought ''City Magazine'' in 1975, one of its earliest features was on the Fundamental Fysiks Group, including a photo spread of Sirag, Wolf, Herbert, and Sarfatti.

Research

Bell's theorem and no-cloning theorem

Hugh Gusterson writes that several challenging ideas lie at the heart of quantum physics: that electrons behave like waves and particles; that you can know a particle's location or momentum, but not both; that observing a particle changes its behavior; and that particles appear to communicate with each other across great distances, known as nonlocality and quantum entanglement. It is these concepts that led to the development of quantum information science and quantum encryption, which has been experimentally used, for example, to transfer money and electronic votes. Kaiser argues that the Fundamental Fysiks Group saved physics by exploring these ideas, in three ways: Specifically, in 1981, Nick Herbert, a member of the group, proposed a scheme for sending signals faster than the speed of light using quantum entanglement.

Quantum computing Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though ...

pioneer Asher Peres writes that the refutation of Herbert's ideas led to the development of the no-cloning theorem by William Wootters, Wojciech Zurek, and Dennis Dieks. In a review of Kaiser's book in '' Physics Today'', Silvan Schweber challenges Kaiser's views of the importance of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. He writes that Bell's Theorem was not obscure during the preceding decade, but was worked on by authors such as John Clauser (who was a member of the group) and Eugene Wigner. Schweber also mentioned the work of Alain Aspect, which preceded Nick Herbert's 1981 proposal.

Remote viewing

Given quantum theory's perceived implications for the study of parapsychology and

telepathy Telepathy () is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W ...

, the group cultivated patrons such as the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the human potential movement. In 1972, the CIA and DIA set up a research program, jokingly called ESPionage, which financed experiments into remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute, where the Fundamental Fysiks Group became what Kaiser calls its house theorists.Kaiser, David
"Lecture: How the Hippies Saved Physics"
April 28, 2010 Cambridge Science Festival at MIT Museum, around 28:00 mins. posted at WGBH Forum Network, Retrieved from Internet Archive, May 18, 2015 The group also attempted in mid-1975 to independently reproduce the experiments done by SRI in the field; in particular, an experiment featuring one subject in the laboratory attempting to draw or describe a scene, observed by a different individual from a remote location outside of the laboratory. An independent panel of judges was to then determine how close the produced images were to the target location. These experiments were determined not to be statistically significant, though Kaiser notes that one subject showed detailed descriptions of other targets than the one in question at the time.Kaiser 2011, p. 95

Research

Bell's theorem and no-cloning theorem

Remote viewing

See also

Notes

Further reading