Need to explore some new physics? Want to understand something new? Want to find a place where your ideas, fantasies, desires, and questions can be explored? Then build a community. For me, that’s the take-home message of How the Hippies Saved Physics. David Kaiser tells us the stories behind the people, logistics, and ramifications of the interlocking communities of physicists from the 1970s. The details range from the mundane to the astonishing, but the power of community rings through.
How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival
W. W. Norton & Company
400 pages
I’ve become involved in two communities over the last year that mirror, in some ways, the types of communities mentioned in the book. One is similar to the mail correspondence circles of both Ira Einhorn and Jack Sarfatti. These men worked very hard to develop a list of people that they could send unpublished information out to in order to start conversations. Einhorn worked predominantly as an editor for his mailings, pulling together tidbits from across the spectra of physics, psychology, parapsychology, and beyond. Sarfatti mostly mailed out original works of his own to try to get feedback in a way that was much faster, though more diffuse, than journal publishing.
In November 2010, I decided to take Twitter seriously, using it to improving myself as a physics teacher. As I recall, I had something like 14 followers at the time. Getting my bearings in the Twitter world, I even started using a hashtag: #physicsed. I did a search for others doing the same and found one other had used it in the previous year. I kept using it hoping it would stick. Now, one year later, I have 350 followers and followees (mostly physics educators), and the hashtag is used dozens of times a week. I have worked hard to make this my go-to community of physics tweeps, and it has really paid off. Just as Sarfatti and others in the Fundamental Fysiks Group circumvented official publishing models to get their ideas out, Twitter, for me and hundreds of others who choose physics as their passion, allows us to question, inform, entertain, and, mostly, support one another.
The other community that struck me as I read the book was the Fundamental Fysiks Group itself. Here was a group of physicists who were all grappling with the fundamental nature of quantum physics, and who realized that experimentation wasn’t enough. They craved conversation and community to help wrap their brains around these new ideas. In February 2011, some of my physics tweeps and I tried an experiment. We wanted to be able to get together virtually to deepen some of our Twitter conversations. We chose Wednesday nights at 9:30ET to meet in an online conference room to talk about anything and everything having to do with physics education. We christened it the Global Physics Department, and we’ve held it every Wednesday since. We’ve talked about textbooks, software, grading, feedback, outreach, and dark energy, among other topics. What’s so great is how easy it is. You can join this group in your pajamas and, for me at least, get more out of it than a formal conference. Just as those intrepid physicists whose story David Kaiser tells found they couldn’t be heard elsewhere, so many of today’s physics educators feel isolated—either literally, in the sense of a single physics teacher in a high school, or in other ways, as a Physics Education Researcher might be alone in her physics department at a university.
The hippies saved physics by building community. I believe communities like Twitter and the Global Physics Department have saved my teaching passion. Consider joining us; you won’t regret it.
Andy Rundquist is professor of physics at Hamline University.
See also: James Kakalios, How the Hippies Saved Physics, Part 1
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