British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Richard Noakes

Classical Physics Reclassified: Unusual Physics and Psychic Phenomena in Late-Victorian Britain

The late Victorian period witnessed a resurgence of interest in the occult and few events illustrated this trend more spectacularly than the foundation in 1882 of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). In its first decades the SPR enjoyed a growing membership and produced sensational evidence for telepathy, phantasms of the living, human automatism, ectoplasm and many other unusual phenomena. Historians have long been puzzled by the fact that the SPR elite included many of the leading figures in ‘classical’ physics including William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, and J. J. Thomson. Typically they conclude that these scientists’ approaches to psychic phenomena were ‘unscientific’ or weakened by religious or other non-scientific interests because their approaches apparently deviate from methodological norms followed in physical investigation.

This paper argues that we should not be surprised by the approaches taken by these physicists towards psychic phenomena once we consider the puzzles they faced in their investigations of physical phenomena. I begin by exploring the extent to which British physical scientists were preoccupied with psychic phenomena and suggest that although they disagreed on how to experiment on and interpret psychical manifestations, they agreed that many experimental problems and claims in classical physics made the positive results of psychical research tolerable and plausible. I then examine some of ways in which physical scientists negotiated the relationship between psychic phenomena in physics. This took place at many levels. First, they speculated on how the ‘new’ physics of such startling phenomena as X-rays furnished physical mechanisms for telepathy. Second, they defended psychic investigation by emphasising that criticisms of evidence for the ‘unusual’ psychic phenomena could also be levelled at apparently robust evidence for such transient phenomena of physics as spectral lines. Third, physical scientists, keen to disarm the threat of a materialistic physics, embraced psychical research as another scientific way of accomplishing what electron theories of matter were already showing: that scientific enterprises could accommodate an immaterial world and demonstrate the importance of mind in the physical universe. I conclude by suggesting that the forays of Victorian physicists into the seance force us to rethink what counted as ‘classical’ physics.

Richard Noakes is British Academy-Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge. He gained his PhD from Cambridge University and held a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. He has published on Victorian science and spiritualism, the representation of science in nineteenth century periodicals, and is the co-editor of several books including From Newton to Hawking: A History of Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professors of Mathematics (Cambridge, 2003), Culture, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Media (Aldershot, in press 2004) and Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge, in press 2004).