Faster-than-light reading

摘要

The hippies, it seems, are ready for their close-up. A raft of books in the past few years has carved out a prominent role for the counterculture in the history of science and technology: Kelly Moore's (2008) Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military; Fred Turner's (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; Andrew Kirk's (2007) Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism; Eric Vettel's (2006) Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry; and now David Kaiser's (2011) How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. Thanks to these works, we can dispense with the conventional view that the hippies were uniformly anti-science and anti-technology. Instead, we can see that many participants in the counterculture possessed an enthusiastic, if often unorthodox, vision for science and technology. That vision was inhomogeneous to the point of contradiction: sometimes opposed to, sometimes partnering with the military-industrial complex; sometimes anticapitalist, sometimes entrepreneurial in the extreme; sometimes other-directed, sometimes narcissistic. Yet, in some ways, that diversity was the counterculture's contribution to science and technology - the hippies and their fellow travelers pried open the homogeneity and narrowness of vision of the early Cold War, and replaced them with a spirit of wide-ranging inquiry and experience.