In the days leading up to Woodstock, posters and advertisements pronounced the music festival—held 50 years ago on 15 to 18 August 1969—as an “Aquarian exposition.” The watery descriptor, derived from astrology, was popularized two years earlier by the hit musical Hair. As the American pop music group The 5th Dimension sang in “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” in the new era, “Peace will guide the planets/And love will steer the stars.” Many people, especially those associated with the counterculture, welcomed the dawning of a New Age that would be guided more by “mystic crystal revelation” than traditional science.
But the Age of Aquarius was also the Age of Apollo. And in the summer of 1969, just a month before the Woodstock festival, hundreds of millions of people watched American astronauts walk on the surface of the Moon and return safely to their home planet. Science and technology—from new materials to digital computers to precision navigation—had made this feat possible, not hippie mysticism. NASA administrator Thomas Paine proclaimed the success of the Apollo program as the “triumph of the squares—the guys with computers and slide rules.”
A half-century later, the confluence of the Ages of Aquarius and Apollo presents historians of science with a challenge. How do we reconcile one of the 20th century’s most impressive technoscientific achievements with bucolic images of young Americans frolicking in Woodstock’s muddy fields?
The notion that there must be an opposition between hard-nosed science and freewheeling New Age enthusiasms was articulated with particular force by Theodore Roszak in his 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture. Roszak, a left-leaning professor at a California State University campus, described how the youth of his day were fleeing science “as if from a place inhabited by plague.”
In Roszak’s telling, members of the counterculture were more likely to embrace astrology, Eastern religions, and chemically enhanced spirituality than astrophysics, engineering, or molecular biology. Other observers at the time were quick to agree. Surveying the trajectory of science in the United States since 1945, physicist Edward Teller concluded that the “lack of interest” in science among America’s youth was “the surest sign of decadence” (1, 2).
The belief that young people in the United States during this period were anti-science has persisted to the present day. Many historians have repeated Roszak and Teller’s simple dichotomy, pitting countercultural ideals against science.
Yet the dichotomy obscures at least as much as it clarifies about the era. The 1970s—a much-maligned decade in popular culture, to be sure—was a period of substantial change in American science and technology. A growing literature by historians of science and technology has begun to reveal the colorful and unexpected ways in which various strands of the counterculture embraced particular forms of science and technology—an amalgam that we have dubbed “groovy science” (3).