Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture
In his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Roszak described the youth of the late 1960s as fleeing science “as if from a place inhabited by plague,” and even seeking “subversion of the scientific worldview” itself. Roszak’s view has come to be our own: when we think of the youth movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, we think of a movement that was explicitly anti-scientific in its embrace of alternative spiritualities and communal living. Such a view is far too simple, ignoring the diverse ways in which the era’s countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science—of a certain type. Rejecting hulking, militarized technical projects like Cold War missiles and mainframes, Boomers and hippies sought a science that was both small-scale and big-picture, as exemplified by the annual workshops on quantum physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or Timothy Leary’s championing of space exploration as the ultimate “high.” Groovy Science explores the experimentation and eclecticism that marked countercultural science and technology during one of the most colorful periods of American history.
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Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture
In his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Roszak described the youth of the late 1960s as fleeing science “as if from a place inhabited by plague,” and even seeking “subversion of the scientific worldview” itself. Roszak’s view has come to be our own: when we think of the youth movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, we think of a movement that was explicitly anti-scientific in its embrace of alternative spiritualities and communal living. Such a view is far too simple, ignoring the diverse ways in which the era’s countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science—of a certain type. Rejecting hulking, militarized technical projects like Cold War missiles and mainframes, Boomers and hippies sought a science that was both small-scale and big-picture, as exemplified by the annual workshops on quantum physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or Timothy Leary’s championing of space exploration as the ultimate “high.” Groovy Science explores the experimentation and eclecticism that marked countercultural science and technology during one of the most colorful periods of American history.
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Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture
In his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Roszak described the youth of the late 1960s as fleeing science “as if from a place inhabited by plague,” and even seeking “subversion of the scientific worldview” itself. Roszak’s view has come to be our own: when we think of the youth movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, we think of a movement that was explicitly anti-scientific in its embrace of alternative spiritualities and communal living. Such a view is far too simple, ignoring the diverse ways in which the era’s countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science—of a certain type. Rejecting hulking, militarized technical projects like Cold War missiles and mainframes, Boomers and hippies sought a science that was both small-scale and big-picture, as exemplified by the annual workshops on quantum physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or Timothy Leary’s championing of space exploration as the ultimate “high.” Groovy Science explores the experimentation and eclecticism that marked countercultural science and technology during one of the most colorful periods of American history.
David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, and is coeditor of Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Introduction David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray Part One: Conversion 1 Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958-1968 D. Graham Burnett 2 Blowing Foam and Blowing Minds: Better Surfing through Chemistry Peter Neushul and Peter Westwick 3 Santa Barbara Physicists in the Vietnam Era Cyrus C. M. Mody Part Two: Seeking 4 Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s Nadine Weidman 5 A Quest for Permanence: The Ecological Visioneering of John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute Henry Trim 6 The Little Manual That Started a Revolution: How Hippie Midwifery Became Mainstream Wendy Kline Part Three: Personae 7 The Unseasonable Grooviness of Immanuel Velikovsky Michael D. Gordin 8 Timothy Leary’s Transhumanist SMI2LE W. Patrick McCray 9 Science of the Sexy Beast: Biological Masculinities and the Playboy Lifestyle Erika Lorraine Milam Part Four: Legacies 10 Alloyed: Countercultural Bricoleurs and the Design Science Revival Andrew Kirk 11 How the Industrial Scientist Got His Groove: Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Fashioning of Technoscientific Innovators Matthew Wisnioski 12 When Chèvre Was Weird: Hippie Taste, Technoscience, and the Revival of American Artisanal Food Making Heather Paxson Afterword: The Counterculture’s Looking Glass David Farber and Beth Bailey Contributors Index
