How the Hippies Saved Physics

How the Hippies Saved Physics
David Kaiser Professor, science, technology & society, MIT

MIT Professor David Kaiser describes the field of physic's bumpy transition from New Age to cutting edge.

In recent years, the field of quantum information science has catapulted to the cutting edge of physics. Long before the big budgets and dedicated teams, however, the field smoldered on the scientific sidelines within the hazy, bong-filled excesses of the 1970s New Age movement. Many of the ideas that now occupy the core of quantum information science once found their home amid an anything-goes counterculture frenzy, a mishmash of spoon-bending psychics, Eastern mysticism, LSD trips, CIA spooks chasing mind-reading dreams, and comparable "Age of Aquarius" enthusiasts.

Owsley "Bear" Stanley has joined the ancestors

(Reuters) - Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was 76.

The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco's Bay Area.

"He made acid so pure and wonderful that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their band in its honor," former rock 'n' roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Hendrix's song "Purple Haze" was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley's product, though the guitarist denied any drug link. The ear-splitting psychedelic-blues combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch.

Stanley briefly managed the Grateful Dead, and oversaw every aspect of their live sound at a time when little thought was given to amplification in public venues. His tape recordings of Dead concerts were turned into live albums, providing him with a healthy income in later life.

"When it came to technology, the Bear was one of the most far-out and interesting guys on the planet," Cutler wrote. "The first FM live simulcast could be, in part, attributed to his vision, as could the first quadraphonic simulcast on radio."

The Dead, a fabled rock band formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 known for its improvisational live concerts, wrote about him in their song "Alice D. Millionaire" after a 1967 arrest prompted a newspaper to describe Stanley as an "LSD millionaire."

Steely Dan's 1976 single "Kid Charlemagne" was loosely inspired by Stanley's exploits.

'COMMUNITY SERVICE'

According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started cooking LSD after discovering the recipe in a chemistry journal at the University of California, Berkeley.

The police raided his first lab in 1966, but Stanley successfully sued for the return of his equipment. After a marijuana bust in 1970, he went to prison for two years.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he told the Chronicle's Joel Selvin.

"What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."

He emigrated to the tropical Australian state of Queensland in the early 1980s, apparently fearful of a new ice age, and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He lost one of his vocal cords to cancer.

Stanley was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky, a state governed by his namesake grandfather from 1915 to 1919. He served in the U.S. Air Force for 18 months, studied ballet in Los Angeles and then enrolled at UC Berkeley. In addition to producing and advocating LSD, he adhered to an all-meat diet.

Cutler, speaking on behalf of the family, said in an interview that Stanley and his wife, Sheila, were driving to their home near the city of Cairns along a dangerous stretch of highway when he evidently lost control during a storm. He died instantly; his wife broke her collar bone.

Stanley is also survived by four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

By: Dean Goodman, Peter Bohan and Todd Eastham

Also See: Bruce Eisner’s Interview with an Alchemist

Panel discussion: Leary, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Hoffman, Corso, Di Prima + McKenna

From: The Psychedelic Salon

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima

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PROGRAM NOTES:
"There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education." –Timothy Leary

"I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made." –Allen Ginsberg

[NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.]

"To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances." –Terence McKenna

"It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone."

"Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence."

"I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!"

"The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream."

"The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature."

"The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked."

The Psychedelic Salon

Aquarius Rising by Pierre Sogol

Project by: Damer.com
Found by way of my friend Lorenzo

Aquarius Rising by Pierre Sogol.
Bringing a rare 1967 film documenting
hippie life in California back to life!

Grateful thanks to Bruce Damer, Rob Menzies, Leon Tabory, Al Lundell and many others, this classic documentary may now be seen online. This material is informing a number of projects including Holly Rae Harman's history of the Ben Lomond Holiday Commune and Ralph Abraham's HIP Santa Cruz History Project.

 
Aquarius Rising Chapter 1: (Above) Begins with flashing facts about the entheogen's impact on religion & civilization. Then documents a Be-In in Orange County, Various festivals in LA, the Sunset Riots and the resulting hearings.

Aquarius Rising Chapter 2: In this chapter they visit the “strawberry fields” LSD commune in the hills near Thousand Oaks, CA. They also stop in at the nearby Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

Aquarius Rising Chapter 3: In this episode, the gang goes to the “New Mecca” (San Francisco). Scenes from the Haight, hippie wedding, Summer of Love, Natasha’s tale, Oregon LSD trip, Nancy (who reappears frequently in other chapters), July 4th in Golden Gate Park.

Aquarius Rising Chapter 4: Here we hear from Nancy, and witness open drug dealing on the streets of Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

Aquarius Rising Chapter 5: In this episode we have more scenes from OM Holiday Commune (Ben Lomond). Next we go to Love Street to Betty’s house (Elizabeth Gips) in the Haight for a group discussion. Then jump to a public hearing about hippies, end with Stephen on guitar.

Aquarius Rising Chapter 6: Here we witness Camilla (visiting the famous Betty) and tripping on LSD on the beach at Bodega Bay. Next a trip on OM Holiday Commune’s magic bus down to Ben Lomond Holiday Commune, Nancy the “Florence Nightingale of the Haight” arrives, and some good sitar was played.

Aquarius Rising Chapter 7: This last chapter or “appendix” shows various scenes and rolls credits and opinions.

magic mushrooms and the sixties

Continued from: The Mushroom Gods

After their discovery in 1955, magic mushrooms remained the domain of middle-class botanists and adventurers who hightailed it to Mexico to follow R Gordon Wasson's trail

Meanwhile, Swiss biochemist Albert Hoffman, the creator of LSD, was studying the mushrooms in his lab and was soon to isolate the stable active ingredient, psilocybin.

By 1958 his company Sandoz were sending out little pink pills of psilocybin to curious psychologists and therapists all over the world.

The high priest
One such package arrived on the doorstep of Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary.

He soon became convinced that psilocybin (and later, LSD) presented an opportunity to map the uncharted frontiers of the mind. Over a 15-month period, he conducted a series of experiments into the psychedelic state.

Some were indulgent, some uneventful, some frankly rubbish. Some though, like the Good Friday experiment, revealed some interesting insights.

the good friday experiment
The setting was Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Leary and co divided 20 theology students into five groups of four. Half were given psilocybin, and the rest were given a placebo of nicotinic acid, which causes facial flushes, nothing else. It was a double blind study - neither the students nor the ex-school teachers who asked the 147-part questionnaire after the experiment knew who had been given what. Within an hour, though, it was pretty clear:

"While half sat attentively listening to the Easter service that was being piped in from the main chapel, the others were all over the place, lying on benches moaning, or wandering around fixating on the various religious icons. One sat at an organ, playing weird, exciting chords." (from Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens)

Of the 10 who downed the nicotinic acid, only one reported anything close to a religious experience. Of the 10 who took psilocybin, nine reported having a mystical experience.

turn on, tune in, drop out
Unfortunately, the "miracle of Marsh Chapel" finally broke Harvard's patience. Leary was soon sacked and, with his catchy mantra: "Turn on, tune in, drop out", spearheaded a psychedelic-soaked counter-culture revolution in 60's America. It would culminate in the Summer Of Love in 1967, and then go rapidly pear-shaped with media hysteria, Leary's arrest, and the banning of psilocybin (along with LSD) in 1968.

From: thegooddrugsguide.com