Groovy Science : Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture / David Kaiser, W. Patrick McCray.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Kaiser, David, Editor.

McCray, W. Patrick, 1967- Editor.

Series:

Knowledge, Innovation & American Counterculture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science--Social aspects--United States.

Science.

Counterculture--United States--History--20th century.

Counterculture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (433 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958- 1968

2. Blowing Foam and Blowing Minds: Better Surfing through Chemistry

3. Santa Barbara Physicists in the Vietnam Era

4. Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s

5. A Quest for Permanence: The Ecological Visioneering of John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute

6. The Little Manual That Started a Revolution: How Hippie Midwifery Became Mainstream

7. The Unseasonable Grooviness of Immanuel Velikovsky

8. Timothy Leary's Transhumanist SMI2LE

9. Science of the Sexy Beast: Biological Masculinities and the Playboy Lifestyle

10. Alloyed: Countercultural Bricoleurs and the Design Science Revival

11. How the Industrial Scientist Got His Groove: Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Fashioning of Technoscientific Innovators

12. When Chèvre Was Weird: Hippie Taste, Technoscience, and the Revival of American Artisanal Food Making

Afterword: The Counterculture's Looking Glass

Contributors

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226373072

022637307X

OCLC:

948690724