Hippies in the Sunday Times

David Kaiser, MIT science historian, author of How the Hippies Saved Physics

Continuing praise for MIT historian David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics.

Here's the book's webpage with pictures and reviews.


The buzz for David's book began in the blogs--in my own blog, in Peter Woit's and Chad Orzel's. (Everyone is eagerly awaiting an endorsement from Lubos Motl, controversial physics blogoczar and kingmaker to the lucrative Czech science book market).


That initial buzz around David's book has now expanded to a ROAR with a review by George Johnson in this Sunday's New York Times. A book review in the Sunday Times is the literary equivalent of a private interview with the Pope.

Thank you, George.


George Johnson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and is the prize-winning author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, an acclaimed biography of Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann as well as many other well-crafted pieces of science writing.

George Johnson concluded his mostly sympathetic review of Kaiser's book with the judgment that much of the work of "the hippies who saved physics" was mere "physics porn"--"titillating but with no follow through".

How could Johnson have known in his witty putdown that one of the goals of my own quantum tantra research is to discover a more intimate way of connecting with nature than merely reading the results of classical instruments?

In writing his review, George Johnson knew nothing of Lifting the Veil of a New Sensual Science, of Tantric Jihad, of Future Science, No More Safe Science, of Physicist, Heal Thyself or of Opening Night.

Unaware of Harlot Nature, Johnson was able to accurately intuit my work as a species of "physics porn".

Will future generations recognize science journalist George Johnson not only for his substantial body of science writing but also as an unconscious herald of the freshest and most unlikely revolution in modern physics?

George Johnson, author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments