The argument of this book, say the editors, is that ‘members of many strands of the American counterculture, although wary of a larger society that seemed to prize conformity, consumerism, and planned obsolescence, were not antiscience’, but instead, by converting the techniques of the squares, seeking self-sufficiency and melding the results with a ‘hip consumerism’, they developed a ‘groovy’ kind of science of their own (pp. 2–6). Theodore Roszak is the straw man here. The author of The Making of the Counter Culture (1969) had placed science and the hippies at opposite poles; the papers of this collection add to a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that the patterns were in fact much more complex and more interesting.

Here's the good news. The case studies are fantastic. They are all strong, although personal favourites include D. Graham Burnett on the rise and fall of John C. Lilly's attempts to communicate with dolphins; Peter Neushul and Peter Westwick on the 1960s surfboard revolution's connections to modern industrial chemistry; Heather Paxson's contrasting story of how artisan cheese makers came to terms with the food industry; Nadine Weidman's essay on Abraham Maslow, the psychologist who invented ‘self-actualization’, and his uncomfortable embrace by the Esalen Institute; Henry Trim on John Todd's vision of sustainability through engineering at the New Alchemy Institute; Wendy Kline's account of how midwives publishing countercultural manuals brought back home births; Michael Gordin's retelling of the rise of extraordinary enthusiasm for Immanuel Velikovsky's theories; W. Patrick McCray on another guru, Timothy Leary; and Erika Lorraine Milam on sciences of sexuality and animal behaviour in Playboy.

At several points the interplay of counterculture, industry and the Cold War is apparent. At first sight the shift from long to shortboards in surfing (‘the greatest conceptual shift in surfing history’ (p. 55)) looks like a move from mass to artisanal craft production, in which guru ‘shapers’ took centre stage. But the polyurethane foam that filled the boards was a technology of great military interest, and the materials and moulding machines came from chemical and aerospace suppliers. The ‘proliferation of small-scale, backyard shapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s depended on the supply of cheap foam blanks … and on cheap raw materials supplied by … the global chemical industry, whose production runs were in turn supported by the defense industry’ (p. 63). Moving in the other direction, groovy science could be of interest to Cold War patrons. While Lilly's dolphin research spiralled into controversy, both his early work and that of his buttoned-up rival Forrest G. Wood, who became head of the Marine Biosciences Facility of the Naval Missile Center, directly appealed to the US Navy.

But there are weaknesses in the whole. One – the focus on just one country, the United States – can be forgiven, not least because the individual papers are so rich. However, the national focus introduces truncations. Australians and Hawaiians were important in the shortboard revolution, for example, but are skipped over to pay attention to Californians. One of the key midwifery manuals, Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Newborn, began, as Kline discusses, as missionary teaching papers for training courses in Communist-controlled North China, and was translated into Spanish, Korean and Portuguese, before becoming the ‘do-it-yourself tool that would provide the necessary foundations for a burgeoning home birth movement’ (p. 180). The United States was an extreme case, where the midwife had nearly disappeared by the mid-twentieth century, and the story of her reappearance in that country consequently was dramatic. But the phenomenon clearly had vital transnational dimensions. The editors’ explanation of the national focus – ‘because the essays in this volume range across the physical, biological, and social sciences, and because the historiography of the long 1970s has been an especially active area among American historians’ (p. 8) – is fair, but should have been the start, not the end, of the discussion.

Second, the editors’ short introduction (and even shorter afterword by David Farber and Beth Bailey) represents missed opportunities to offer a more general analysis of science in the long 1960s. I've tried to do this meta-analysis myself, and it is difficult. I argued in the BJHS (vol. 41, pp. 567–600) that amidst all the noise, a pattern can be discerned. Much of that pattern can be found in the Groovy Science case studies: the proliferation of expertise, the centrality of social movements and their apparent leaders, and especially the turn towards the individual self. So, for example, Gordin's paper amply demonstrates how the second coming of Velikovsky was a product of the youth movement. Elsewhere, Burnett notes Lilly's language of ‘turning inward’ (p. 21), McCray identifies Leary's persistent transhumanist theme of ‘personal metamorphosis and enhancement of the individual through technology’ (p. 261), while Weidman's case study of Abraham Maslow's self-actualization psychology exemplifies the complete pattern. ‘Many participants pursued some version of groovy science as a kind of secularized, quasi-spiritual quest’, observe the editors, in which a search for ‘“authenticity,” “self-actualization,” and sustainable self-sufficiency drove experiments in everything from psychology to environmental management to medical care’ (pp. 4–5).

Finally, while the editors remind us that groovy science had a legacy, in which ‘once radical ideas have since been absorbed into the mainstream, their countercultural roots obscured, ignored, or forgotten’ (p. 5), the extent and significance of such consequences deserve deeper analysis. It is not simply that some of us now eat artisan goat cheese or work in sustainable buildings. There are roots here of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron call the ‘Californian ideology’, the neoliberal technophilia of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the fetishizing of ‘innovation’ (neatly addressed in this volume in the bijou paper by Matthew Wisnioski on innovation-speak in the short-lived tech magazines that invented the concept of the ‘change manager’), and the rise of the ‘network’ as arch-metaphor. Abraham Maslow, late in life, with the good vibes of self-actualization theory beginning to turn sour, began to wonder whether hierarchy was in fact the answer. But it would be a pyramid where the entrepreneurial pharaohs could continue to network. ‘Perhaps different social or governmental structures should apply to the different classes of people’, Weidman summarizes Maslow's dark thoughts, ‘authoritarian for those at the lowest levels of motivational hierarchy, freedom-maximizing anarchy for those at the highest’ (p. 131). We do not yet understand fully the causes and consequences of the science, technologies and social transformations of the long 1960s.