Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture ed. by David Kaiser, W. Patrick McCray (review)

Ever since the history of science and technology community made the cold war a hot topic of scholarly study a few years back, its attentions have moved inexorably past the fearful but fabulous Fifties and toward the subversive and smelly Sixties and Seventies. Once fiberglass and transistors left the arsenals and became household words, it was only a matter of time before a few wiseacres turned them into machines for getting fed, getting high, and getting it on. A book literally fifty years in the making, the twelve-chapter anthology of Groovy Science provides the scholarly entry point into Funky Studies our field had needed for some time. Though only the first iteration of what is likely to be the scholarly program of the 2020s, editors David Kaiser (How the Hippies Saved Physics, 2011) and W. Patrick McCray (The Visioneers, 2013), joined by leading historians of science and technology, hit many of the right notes of 1970s weirdness.

Warfighters-turned-lovemakers are present in the book, but a volume merely about cold war military “spin-offs” would have worn thin after a while, and the editors wisely assert that other processes are at work here. Seventies innovators weren’t merely talented bricoleurs on lapsed Pentagon contracts; they were on a quest for something—it’s not clear what—that they believed only science could give them. Some of these weirdos became famous for their efforts, while others could content themselves in knowing that by the turn of the millennium, much that had once been fringe was now mainstream.

It took boring, old-fashioned book-learning to do good countercultural technoscience, as D. Graham Burnett cautions in his study of dolphin linguist John C. Lilly, and Peter Neushul and Peter Westwick demonstrate while locating the aerospace origins of polyurethane foam surfboards. For the Santa Barbara physicist that Cyrus C. M. Mody chronicles, declines in defense funding offered academic rebels a chance to bloom. Other practitioners, such as counterculturally ambivalent psycho-sage Abraham Maslow (Nadine Weidman) and louche sociobiologist Hugh Hefner (Erika Lorraine Milam), managed to keep a foot in both the straight and groovy worlds at the same time. Some progressives, like cosmology pseudo-guru Immanuel Velikovsky (Michael D. Gordin) and psychedelic transhumanist Timothy Leary (W. Patrick McCray) became household names. Others, like ecological visionary John Todd (Henry Trim) not so much; their work inspired enduring movements rather than celebrity. Notable among the latter case are the midwives behind the home birth movement (Wendy Kline) and the era’s industrial scientists, who sought to place their craft more firmly within some conception of the good (Matthew Wisnioski).

Heather Paxson’s discovery of artisanal chèvre’s roots in the back-to-the-land movement offers just the right dessert course for the volume. (Blessed, indeed, are the cheesemakers.) And a thoughtful conclusion by David Farber and Beth Bailey provides a non-SHOT-goer’s impression of the anthology, finding it a valuable corrective to typical historical approaches to the hippie era. Like Luke Skywalker’s embrace of the light saber over the Death Star in 1977’s Star Wars (spoiler alert), the Big Science rebels of the Long Seventies didn’t abandon technoscience so much as condemn its institutionalization and militarization. The alternative, they promised, would be better for everyone. Some sought to replace the wisdom of the Establishment with their own “appropriate” ideas; most lost control of their intellectual property to rebellious acolytes or market forces larger than the counterculture could contain. At that point, there was usually nothing left for them to do but write a book and move to California.

The editors of Groovy Science offer a call to arms for better study of Seventies science, and wisely anticipate any plausible criticism of their anthology—a kind of text that is, by its nature, discontinuous and incomplete (indeed, many of the articles are fragments of longer works). Kaiser and McCray acknowledge the...