Groovy Science

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.