"In his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Roszak described the youth of the time as fleeing science "as if from a place inhabited by plague" and even seeking "subversion of the scientific worldview" itself. Roszak's view has persisted: the counterculture is popularly regarded as a movement that was explicitly antiscientific in its embrace of alternative spiritualities and communal living. Such a view is too simple, ignoring the diverse ways in which the era's countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science--but of a certain type. Rejecting hulking, militarized technical projects like Cold War missiles and mainframes, baby boomers and hippies alike 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."--Page 4 of cover.