John Samuel Hagelin (/heɪɡɛlɪn/;[1] born June 9, 1954) is a physicist and the leader of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement in the United States.

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.

[5][6][19] 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.

[21] In 1992, Hagelin received a Kilby International Award from the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce "for his promising work in particle physics in the development of supersymmetric grand unified field theory".

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

[27] 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.

[5] Approximately 4,000 people from 82 countries gathered in Washington, DC, and practiced TM for six hours a day from June 7 to July 30.

The meditation included "yogic flying", a technique taught through the TM-Sidhi program in which practitioners engage in a series of hops while seated in the lotus position.

Robert L. Park, research professor and former chair of the physics department at the University of Maryland, called the study a "clinic in data distortion".

[5] In 1994, a science satire magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, "awarded" Hagelin the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace, "for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C."[32][33] In 1999, Hagelin held a press conference in Washington, D.C. to announce that the TM movement could end the Kosovo War with yogic flying.

Hagelin predicted that as the number of Yogic flyers increased towards 3500, "[p]eace and prosperity will reign [in America], and violence and conflict will subside completely".

[59][60] In July 2007, he said that the assembly was responsible for the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching a record high of 14,022 and predicted that it would top 17,000 within a year.

[7] In 1994, Hagelin was award the satirical Ig Nobel Prize for his experiment of yogic flyers and crime rate as the "silliest scientific studies of the year".

[7] 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.

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.

[23] 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".

[18] 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.