John Hagelin

John Samuel Hagelin (born June 9, 1954) is the leader of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement in the United States.

He is president of Maharishi International University (MIU) in Fairfield, Iowa, and honorary chair of its board of trustees.

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 about quantum 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.

After Taft, Hagelin attended Dartmouth College.

At the end of his freshman year he studied TM in Vittel, France, and returned as a qualified TM teacher.

The university was established in 1973 by the TM movement's founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to deliver a "consciousness-based education".

In 1975 he obtained his A.B. in physics with highest honors (summa cum laude) from Dartmouth.

He went on to study physics at Harvard University under Howard Georgi, earning a master's degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1981.

By the time he had received his Ph.D., he had published several papers on particle theory.

From 1979 to 1996, Hagelin published over 70 papers about particle physics, electroweak unification, grand unification, supersymmetry and cosmology, most of them in academic scientific journals.

Hagelin graduated with a Ph.D., in physics, in 1981, from Harvard University, and did several months of post-doctoral research at the CERN, before moving to do further post-doctoral work at the SLAC.

In 1981 Hagelin became a postdoctoral researcher for few months at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) in Switzerland, and in 1982 he moved to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California.

He left SLAC in 1983, reportedly because of personal problems.

A year later he joined Maharishi International University (MIU), as chair of the physics department.

Two of Hagelin's previous collaborators, Dimitri Nanopoulos and John Ellis, were uncomfortable with his move to MIU, but they continued to work with him.

While at MIU, Hagelin received funding from the National Science Foundation.

He co-authored a 1983 paper in Physics 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.

In 1984, he became a professor of physics at Maharishi International University (MIU), then later became university president.

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.

His work on the flipped SU(5) heterotic superstring theory is considered one of the more successful unified field theories, or "theories of everything", and was highlighted in 1991 in a cover story in Discover magazine.

Hagelin stood as a candidate for President of the United States for the Natural Law Party, a party founded by the TM movement, in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections.

In a 1992 news article for Nature 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 the flipped 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 of partial differential equations had been appearing in the U.S. media, purporting to show how TM affected distant events.

In the summer of 1993, Hagelin directed a project aimed at demonstrating what TM practitioners call the Maharishi effect, the purported ability of a large group to affect the behavior of others by practising TM.

He is the author of Manual for a Perfect Government (1998), which sets out how to apply "natural law" to matters of governance.

Hagelin is also president of the David Lynch Foundation, which promotes TM.

Hagelin was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the second of four sons, to Mary Lee Hagelin, née Stephenson, a school teacher, and Carl William Hagelin, a businessman.

He was raised in Connecticut, and won a scholarship to the Taft School for boys in Watertown.

Hagelin was featured in the movies What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004) and The Secret (2006).

João Magueijo, professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, described What the Bleep Do We Know!? as "horrendously tedious", consisting of deliberate misrepresention of science and "ludicrous extrapolations".

Hagelin postulates that his extended version of unified field theory is identified with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's "unified field of consciousness", a view that was rejected by "virtually every theoretical physicist in the world" in 2006.

In his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and The Search for Unity In Physical Law (2007), the physicist Peter 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".

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.

It was intended that he become president of Maharishi Central University, which was under construction in Smith 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.

During his time at CERN, SLAC and MUM, Hagelin worked on supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and grand unification theories.

In a 2012 interview in Science 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.

Hagelin became a trustee of MUM and, in 2016, its president.