How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser

How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser

How the Hippies Saved Physics took me back to my undergraduate days, my first two courses in Quantum Mechanics. Like the protagonists of Kaiser's book, I wanted to understand quantum mechanics. But the profs had their line that always closed off any inquiry--"Shut up and calculate!" The math’s works, the theory works--why are you wasting your time in trying to figure out the Schrodinger wave function, wave particle duality, which slit an electron passes through in Young's double-slit experiment?

An exasperated prof finally told me, "Then why are you unhappy?" as if the problem was with ME instead of the physics. A physics that no one really understood. Physicists were happy to "shut up and calculate". And so I switched majors and took up Astronomy. At least astronomers struck me as honest about what they didn't understand.

And so I was thrilled to find a group of physicists who were also not content to "shut up and calculate". Dissatisfied with the...

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