Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture

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.