In 1981, Hagelin graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and then did several months ofpost-doctoral research atCERN. He went on to do post-doctoral work at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC). In 1984, he became a professor of physics at MIU, and later became the university's president.[4] Hagelin postulates that his extended version ofunified field theory is identified withMaharishi Mahesh Yogi's "unified field of consciousness", but this view was rejected by "virtually every theoretical physicist in the world" in 2006.[5] Hagelin has published over 70 papers aboutparticle physics,electroweak unification,grand unification,supersymmetry, andcosmology, most of them in academic scientific journals,[6] and co-authored a 1983 paper in "Physics Letters B", that became one of the 103 most-cited articles in the physical sciences in 1983 and 1984.[7][8] A 1984 paper by Hagelin and John Ellis in "Nuclear Physics B", "Supersymmetric relics from the big bang", had been cited over 500 times by 2007.[9]
Hagelin stood as a candidate forPresident of the United States for theNatural Law Party, a party founded by the TM movement, in the1992,1996 and2000 elections.[10] He is the author ofManual for a Perfect Government (1998), which sets out how to apply "natural law" to matters of governance. Hagelin is also the president of theDavid Lynch Foundation, that promotes TM as a remedy for "trauma and toxic stress among at-risk populations.".[11]
Hagelin was born inPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the second of four sons, to Mary Lee Hagelin (née Stephenson), a schoolteacher, and Carl William Hagelin, a businessman.[12][13] He was raised in Connecticut[14] and won a scholarship to theTaft School for boys inWatertown. In July 1970, while at Taft, he was involved in a motorcycle crash that led to a long stay—in a body cast—in the school infirmary. During his time there, he began reading aboutquantum mechanics but was also introduced to TM by a practitioner, Rick Archer, who had been invited to the school to talk about the meditation form, TM.[15][16]
After Taft, Hagelin attendedDartmouth College. At the end of his freshman year, he studied TM inVittel, France, and returned as a qualified TM teacher.[15] In 1975, he obtained his A.B. in physicswith highest honors (summa cum laude) from Dartmouth.[17] He went on to study physics atHarvard University underHoward Georgi, earning a master's degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1981.[15] By the time he had received his Ph.D., he had published several papers on particle theory.[6]
In 1981, Hagelin became a postdoctoral researcher at theEuropean Center for Particle Physics (CERN) in Switzerland, and in 1982, he moved to SLAC in California.[15] He left SLAC in 1983. A year later, he joined Maharishi International University (MIU) as chair of the physics department.[18][19][20] Two of Hagelin's previous collaborators,Dimitri Nanopoulos andJohn Ellis, were uncomfortable with his move to MIU, but they continued to work with him.[21] While at MIU, Hagelin received funding from theNational Science Foundation.[15]
Hagelin became a trustee of MUM and, in 2016, its president.[3] It was intended that he become president of Maharishi Central University, which was under construction inSmith Center, Kansas, until early 2008, when, according to Hagelin, the project was put on hold while the TM organization dealt with the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.[22]
In 1992, Hagelin received aKilby International Award from theNorth Dallas Chamber of Commerce "for his promising work in particle physics in the development of supersymmetric grand unified field theory".[23] According to a member of the selection committee, Hagelin's nomination was proposed by another selection-committee member who was a fellow TM practitioner.[24][25]Chris Anderson, in a 1992Nature article about Hagelin's first presidential campaign, questioned the value of the award.[24]
During his time at CERN, SLAC and MUM, Hagelin worked on supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and grand unification theories.[6] His work on theflipped SU(5) heteroticsuperstring theory is considered one of the more successful unified field theories, or "theories of everything",[24] and was highlighted in 1991 in a cover story inDiscover magazine.[21]
From 1979 to 1996, Hagelin published 73 papers aboutparticle physics,electroweak unification,grand unification,supersymmetry andcosmology, most of them in academic scientific journals.[6] He co-authored a 1983 paper inPhysics Letters B, "Weak symmetry breaking by radiative corrections in broken supergravity", that became one of the 103 most-cited articles in the physical sciences in 1983 and 1984.[26][27] In a 2012 interview inScience Watch, co-author Keith Olive said that his work for the 1984 study was one of the areas that had given him the greatest sense of accomplishment.[28] A 1984 paper by Hagelin and John Ellis inNuclear Physics B, "Supersymmetric relics from the big bang", had been cited over 500 times by 2007.[29]
In the summer of 1993, Hagelin directed a project aimed at demonstrating what TM practitioners call theMaharishi effect, the purported ability of a large group to affect the behavior of others by practising TM.[30] The TM movement believes that one tenth of the square root of the population of a country meditating can bring about peace.[31] However, critics point to a lack of credible supporting evidence.[18]
Approximately 4,000 people from 82 countries gathered in Washington, DC, and practiced TM for six hours a day from June 7 to July 30. The meditation included "yogic flying", a technique taught through theTM-Sidhi program in which practitioners engage in a series of hops while seated in thelotus position. Hagelin claimed that there was a local reduction in crime due to this activity.[30][32]
According to Hagelin, the analysis was examined by an "independent review board", although all members of the board were TM practitioners.Robert L. Park, research professor and former chair of the physics department at the University of Maryland, called the study a "clinic in data distortion".[18] In 1994, a science satire magazine,Annals of Improbable Research, "awarded" Hagelin theIg Nobel Prize for Peace, "for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C."[33][34]
In 1999, Hagelin held a press conference in Washington, D.C. to announce that the TM movement could end theKosovo War with yogic flying. He suggested that NATO set up an elite corps of 7,000 yogic flyers at a cost of $33 million.[19][35]
In 1990, Hagelin founded Enlightened Audio Designs Corporation (EAD) with Alastair Roxburgh.[36] The company designed and manufactured high-end digital-to-analog converters.[37] EAD was sold in 2001 to Alpha Digital Technologies in Oregon.[36]
Hagelin and 12 others founded theNatural Law Party in April 1992 in Fairfeld, based on the view that problems of governance could be solved more effectively by following "natural law", the organizing principle of the universe.[17][38] The party platform included preventive health care, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy technologies. Hagelin favored abortion rights without public financing, campaign-finance law reform, more restrictive gun control, and a flat tax, with no tax for families earning less than $34,000 per year.[39] He campaigned to eradicatePACs and soft money campaign contributions and advocated safety locks on guns, school vouchers, and efforts to prevent war in the Middle East by reducing "people's tension".[40]
The party chose Hagelin andMike Tompkins as its presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 1992 and 1996.[41] Hagelin received 39,212 votes from 32 states in 1992 (and 23 percent of the vote inJefferson County, where MIU is located), and 113,659 votes from 43 states in 1996 (21 percent in Jefferson County).[42][43][44]
Hagelin ran for president again in2000, nominated both by the NLP and by thePerot wing of theReform Party, which disputed the nomination ofPat Buchanan.[45][46] Hagelin's running mate wasNat Goldhaber. A dispute over the Reform Party's nomination generated legal action between the Hagelin and Buchanan campaigns. In September 2000, theFederal Election Commission ruled that Buchanan was the official candidate of the Reform Party and hence eligible to receive federal election funds.[39][47] The Reform Party convention that nominated Hagelin was declared invalid.[48] In spite of the ruling, Hagelin remained on several state ballots as the Reform Party nominee because of the independent nature of some state affiliates; he was also the national nominee of the Natural Law Party, and in New York was theIndependence Party nominee.[47] He received 83,714 votes from 39 states.[49] During the2004 primary elections, Hagelin endorsedDemocratic candidateDennis Kucinich,[50] and in April that year the Executive Committee of the NLP dissolved the NLP as a national organization.[51]
Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy
Hagelin is the director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy (ISTPP), an MIUthink tank.[52] According to the ISTPP's website, he has met with members of Congress and officials at the Department of State and Department of Defense to discuss terrorism.[53][54] In 1993, he helped draft a paragraph inHillary Rodham Clinton's 10,000-pagehealth care plan; according to Hagelin, his was the only paragraph that addressed preventive health care.[55] In 1998, the ISTPP testified about germ-line technologies to the DNA Advisory Committee of theNational Institutes of Health; Hagelin's report to the committee said that "recombinant DNA technology is inherently risky because of the high probability of unexpected side-effects".[56][57]
Hagelin established the US Peace Government (USPG) in July 2003 as an affiliate of theGlobal Country of World Peace and served as the latter's minister of science and technology.[58] According to USPG's website, the TM movement created US Peace Government and the Global Country of World Peace to promote evidence-based, sustainable problem-solving and governance policies that align with "natural law".[59]
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi appointed Hagelin the "Raja of Invincible America" in November 2007. Hagelin organized the Invincible America Assembly in Fairfield in July 2006. The assembly comprised individuals practicing TM andTM-Sidhi techniques twice daily. Hagelin predicted that as the number of Yogic flyers increased towards 3500, "[p]eace and prosperity will reign [in America], and violence and conflict will subside completely".[60][61] In July 2007, he said that the assembly was responsible for theDow Jones Industrial Average reaching a record high of 14,022 and predicted that it would top 17,000 within a year.[62][63]
Hagelin is also president of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace, an organization of scientists opposed to nuclear proliferation and war,[64] and president of theDavid Lynch Foundation, which promotes TM.[11][58]
Hagelin's former academic peers "ostracized him" for combining science with a "form ofHinduism that doesn't acknowledge its roots".[19] Neuroscientist and meditation researcher David Vago states that all of Hagelin's Maharishi Effect studies are "correlation without causation" and Dennis Roark, former chairman of the physics department at MIU, derided Hagelin's research as "crackpot science".[65]
Efforts to link consciousness to the unified field
In a 1992 news article forNature about Hagelin's first presidential campaign,Chris Anderson wrote that Hagelin was "by all accounts a gifted scientist, well-known and respected by his colleagues", but that his effort to link theflipped SU(5) unified field theory to TM "infuriates his former collaborators", who feared it might taint their own work and requests for funding.John Ellis, then director of CERN's department of theoretical physics—who worked with Hagelin on SU(5)—reportedly asked Hagelin to stop comparing it to TM. Anderson wrote that two-page advertisements containing rows ofpartial differential equations had been appearing in the U.S. media, purporting to show how TM affected distant events.[24] In his book,Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and The Search for Unity In Physical Law (2007), the physicistPeter Woit wrote that identification of a unified field of consciousness with a unified field of superstring theory was wishful thinking, and that "[v]irtually every theoretical physicist in the world rejects all of this as nonsense and the work of a crackpot".[6]
Philosopher Evan Fales and sociologist Barry Markovsky remarked that, because no such phenomena have been validated, Hagelin's "far-fetched explanation lacks purpose". They went on to say that the parallels Hagelin highlighted rest on ambiguity, obscurity and vague analogy, supported by the construction of arbitrary similarities.[66]
Hagelin's first marriage, to Margaret Hagelin, ended in divorce.[55] He marriedKara Anastasio, the former vice-chair of the Natural Law Party of Ohio, in 2010.[70][71]
(1998) John S. Hagelin.Manual for a Perfect Government: How to harness the laws of nature to bring maximum success to governmental administration, Fairfield: Maharishi University of Management Press.
^abcdeWoit, Peter (2007).Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. London: Vintage Books. pp. 209–211.ISBN9781446443019.
^Humes, Cynthia Ann. "The Trandescendental Organization and Its Encounter with Science", in James R. Lewis, Olav Hammer (eds.),Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science, Leiden: Brill, 2010 (345–370), 360.ISBN9789004187917
^Weber, Joseph (2014).Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. pp. 23–24.ISBN978-1609382353.Movement publications over time have suggested various numbers needed to create this Maharishi Effect, moving from as high as one-tenth of the adult population to one-hundredth and even one-thousandth. The movement settled on the figure of the square root of 1 percent of a given population....
^Bruce, Alexandra (2007).Beyond The Secret: The Definitive Unauthorized Guide to The Secret. New York: The Disinformation Company, Red Wheel Weiser. p. 100.ISBN9781934708408.
^Nemeth, Stephen (2014). "Natural Law Party", in Larry J. Sabato, Howard R. Ernst (eds.),Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections, Infobase Publishing, p. 241.
^"Natural Law Party". natural-law.org. April 5, 2004.Archived from the original on December 6, 2016. RetrievedFebruary 4, 2017.
^"Hagelin, John".ourcampaigns.com. Our Campaigns.Archived from the original on November 29, 2007. RetrievedJanuary 15, 2011.
^"Dr. John Hagelin".istpp.org. Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy.Archived from the original on March 26, 2010. RetrievedJuly 19, 2010.
^"Minutes of meeting"(PDF). Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee. September 24–25, 1998. pp. 15–16. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on January 14, 2009. RetrievedJanuary 15, 2011.
^Jones, Connie (June 21, 2001). "It's Lights Out for the Natural Law Party".Dayton Daily News. p. Z.4.1.
^"Marriage".The Iowa Source: F-4. November 2010.On August 9 Dr. John Hagelin married Kara Anastasio in Manchester, VT. The couple lives in Fairfield, Iowa.
