John Hagelin

John Samuel Hagelin (/heɪɡɛlɪn/; born June 9, 1954) is an American physicist and the leader of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement in the United States. He was president of Maharishi International University (MIU), formerly Maharishi University of Management (MUM), in Fairfield, Iowa, and honorary chair of its board of trustees.

In 1981, Hagelin graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and then did several months of post-doctoral research at CERN. He went on to do post-doctoral work at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC). In 1984, he became a professor of physics at MIU, and later became the university's president. Hagelin postulates that his extended version of unified field theory is identified with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's "unified field of consciousness", but this view was rejected by "virtually every theoretical physicist in the world" in 2006. Hagelin has published over 70 papers about particle physics, electroweak unification, grand unification, supersymmetry, and cosmology, most of them in academic scientific journals, and co-authored a 1983 paper in "Physics Letters B", that became one of the 103 most-cited articles in the physical sciences in 1983 and 1984. 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.

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. 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 the president of the David Lynch Foundation, that promotes TM as a remedy for "trauma and toxic stress among at-risk populations.".