Elizabeth Rauscher
| Elizabeth Rauscher | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Education | BS (chemistry and physics) MS (nuclear physics) 1965 PhD (nuclear physics) 1978 |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation | Physicist, Parapsychologist |
| Known for | Co-founded the Berkeley Fundamental Fysiks Group |
| Spouse(s) | William van Bise |
 Members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, featured in Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine in 1975.Left to right: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, and (seated) Fred Alan Wolf. |
Elizabeth A. Rauscher is an American physicist and parapsychologist. She is a former researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, and NASA.
In 1975 Rauscher co-founded the Berkeley Fundamental Fysiks Group, an informal group of physicists who met weekly to discuss quantum mysticism and the philosophy of quantum physics. David Kaiser argued in his book, How the Hippies Saved Physics that this group helped to nurture ideas which were unpopular at the time within the physics community, but which later, in part, formed the basis of quantum information science.
Rauscher has an interest in psychic healing and faith healing and other paranormal claims.
In How the Hippies Saved Physics (2011), Kaiser writes that Rauscher had always been interested in science, and as a child had designed and built her own telescopes. Raised near Berkeley, she started hanging around the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory when she was in high school. She enrolled at Berkeley for her first degree, and published her first article, on nuclear fusion, while still an undergraduate. Kaiser writes that she was the only woman in her class; at that time women in America earned only five and two percent of physics undergraduate degrees and PhDs respectively. He writes that she coped with it by wearing tweedy dresses and keeping her hair short, though she experienced some intimidation. She obtained her masters in nuclear physics in 1965. From 1975 to 1978, she was a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute's Radio Physics Laboratory.
She married and had a son, and when she became their sole provider took a job as a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. When her son was old enough, she returned to Berkeley to begin her PhD under Glenn Seaborg, the nuclear chemist. She continued by working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and additionally started and chaired the Livermore Philosophy Group, offering classes on the relationship between science and society at Berkeley, and later at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She completed her PhD in 1978 on "Coupled Channel Alpha Decay Theory for Even and Odd-Mass Light and Heavy Nuclei."
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