Elizabeth Rauscher

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Elizabeth Rauscher
NationalityAmerican
EducationBS (chemistry and physics)
MS (nuclear physics) 1965
PhD (nuclear physics) 1978
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
Known forCo-founded the Berkeley Fundamental Fysiks Group; research into quantum physics and consciousness
SpouseWilliam van Bise

Elizabeth A. Rauscher is a retired physics researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, and NASA; retired professor of physics at John F. Kennedy University and University of Nevada, Reno; and is co-author, with Richard L. Amoroso, of books relating to her interest in parapsychology including The Holographic Anthropic Multiverse (2009), and Orbiting the Moons of Pluto (2011).[1]

In 1975 Rauscher with George Weissmann co-founded the Berkeley Fundamental Fysiks Group, an informal group of physicists who met weekly to discuss the philosophy of quantum physics. David Kaiser writes that it was in large measure thanks to this group that certain ideas were nurtured—ideas unpopular at the time with the mainstream scientific establishment—which now form the basis of quantum information science.[2]

She theorized, in 1974, that an eight-dimensional space-time, rather than Einstein's four dimensions, could account for nonlocal effects and Bell's theorem. She later investigated psychic healing and faith healing; and investigated remote viewing with Russell Targ.[3]

Education and career

In How the Hippies Saved Physics (2011), Kaiser writes that Rauscher had always been interested in science, and as a child had designed and built her own telescopes. Raised near Berkeley, she started hanging around the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory when she was in high school. She enrolled at Berkeley for her first degree, and published her first article, on nuclear fusion, while an undergraduate. Kaiser writes that she was the only woman in her class; at that time women in America earned only five and two percent of physics undergraduate degrees and PhDs respectively. He writes that she coped with it by wearing tweedy dresses and keeping her hair short, though she experienced some intimidation. She obtained her masters in nuclear physics in 1965.[4]

She married, had a son, and took a job as a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons laboratory near Berkeley. When her son was old enough, she returned to Berkeley to begin her PhD under Glenn Seaborg, the nuclear chemist. She continued to work at Livermore and became the chair of the Livermore Philosophy Group, offering classes on the relationship between science and society at Berkeley, and later at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.[4] She completed her PhD in 1978 on "Coupled Channel Alpha Decay Theory for Even and Odd-Mass Light and Heavy Nuclei."[5]

She later held positions as professor of physics and general science at John F. Kennedy University, 1978–1984; research consultant to NASA, 1983–1985; and professor and graduate student adviser in the department of physics at the University of Nevada, Reno, 1990–1998.[6]

Fundamental Fysiks Group

Further information: Fundamental Fysiks Group
External image
image icon Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, featured in Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine in 1975.

Left to right: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, and (seated) Fred Alan Wolf.

At Berkeley in May 1975, she and George Weissmann co-founded the Fundamental Fysiks Group, an informal group of physicists who met for Friday afternoon brainstorming sessions to explore the philosophical problems posed by quantum physics, particularly the relationship between physics and consciousness. The group included Fritjof Capra, John Clauser, Nick Herbert, Jack Sarfatti, Henry Stapp, and Fred Alan Wolf. According to Kaiser, Rauscher and Weissman started the meetings in a fit of pique and frustration, saddened by the absence of a philosophical perspective in their physics classes.[2]

He writes that, in both their discussions and in Epistemological Letters, a hand-typed newsletter they contributed to, the group managed to keep alive ideas about quantum physics that at the time were not respected by the scientific establishment, but which came to form the basis of quantum information science.[2] According to Kaiser, they did this by returning to the philosophical engagement with physics that the group's heroes—Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger—had practiced. In so doing, they rescued Bell's theorem from obscurity, and helped to develop the "no-cloning theorem," a new insight into quantum theory.[7]

Specifically, in 1981, Nick Herbert, a member of the group, proposed a scheme for sending signals faster than the speed of light using quantum entanglement.[8] Quantum computing pioneer Asher Peres writes that the refutation of Herbert's ideas led to the development of the no-cloning theorem by William Wootters, Wojciech Zurek, and Dennis Dieks.[9]

Kaiser describes how Rauscher's personal interests within the group lay with remote viewing, precognition, psychokinesis, remote healing, and ghosts.[10] Jeffrey John Kripal writes that Rauscher broadened the group to included non-physicists, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s the group's members met annually at the Esalen Institute to continue their exchange of ideas, exerting a major influence on alternative religious thought in the United States.[11]

Later research

In the 1990s, Rauscher and her husband—William van Bise, an engineer—moved to an estate in Devotion, North Carolina, owned by Richard J. Reynolds III, grandson of R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco magnate. Until his death in 1994, Reynolds allowed them to live there to conduct research into the effects of electromagnetic fields on brain waves. A third scientist, physician Andrija Puharich, had been living and conducting research on the estate since 1980. After Reynolds' death, the scientists said he had invited them to remain there as long as they wanted, but they were unable to produce a written agreement, and were required by a court to leave.[12]

Rauscher later engaged in remote viewing experiments with Russell Targ and other researchers; they published their findings in 2001, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, positing a geometrical, eight-dimensional Minkowski model of space and time.[13] In 2007, she received an Alyce and Elmer Green Award from the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine for her continued interest in subtle energies and energy medicine.[14]

Selected works

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Pedler, Kit. Mind Over Matter. Taylor & Francis, 1981, p. 48.
  2. ^ a b c Kaiser, David. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011, p. xv–xvii.
  3. ^ For space-time, see Kaiser, pp. 93–94.
  4. ^ a b Kaiser 2011, pp. 49–51.
  5. ^ Rauscher, Elizabeth. "Coupled Channel Alpha Decay Theory for Even and Odd-Mass Light and Heavy Nuclei", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, February 1978.
  6. ^ "Presenters: Elizabeth A. Rauscher, Ph.D.", Breakthru-Techologies.com, accessed August 20, 2011.
  7. ^ Kaiser 2011, pp. xiii–xxv.
  8. ^ Herbert, Nick. "FLASH—A superluminal communicator based upon a new kind of quantum measurement", Foundation of Physics, vol 12, issue 12, 1982, pp. 1171–117.
  9. ^ Peres, Asher. "How the No-Cloning Theorem Got its Name", Fortschritte der Physik, vol 51, issue 4–5, May 2003, pp. 458–461.
  10. ^ Kaiser 2011, p. 262.
  11. ^ Kripal, Jeffrey John. Esalen: America and the religion of no religion. University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 309.
  12. ^ "Scientists being asked to leave Reynolds estate", The Charlotte Observer, November 7, 1994.
  13. ^ Jones, Marie D. Modern Science and the Paranormal. The Rosen Publishing Group, 2009, p. 206.
  14. ^ "Alyce and Elmer Green Award", International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine], accessed August 23, 2011.

Further reading

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