John Hagelin has a penchant for eccentric crusades. He once led 4,000 "yogic fliers" to Washington, D.C., in an attempt to reduce violence through meditation. He's run for president twice on the Natural Law Party's ticket. And in August he wrestled conservative columnist Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party's presidential nomination. At presstime, the party had split in two and the outcome was, uh, still up in the air.
A research associate at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1982-83, Hagelin has a grand vision -- for the universe and for politics. At Stanford, he coauthored a physics paper titled "Flipped SU(5) Supersymmetric Grand Unification." His summary: "The theory reveals the central unity of nature's deepest laws governing the birth and evolution of the universe."
Government should follow those laws, too, Hagelin says. That premise led him to study environmental and health problems and, from there, to jump into politics. "The most powerful way to get the government to listen was to send them scrambling to co-opt our ideas," he says. Now he hopes to compete directly, as the nominee of both the Reform and Natural Law parties. It's surely something to meditate on.
