Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain

Abstract

The lure of spiritual and psychical phenomena has haunted modern science for at least two centuries, peaking in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when a remarkable number of eminent British physicists devoted precious time and lent considerable prestige to the topic. Richard Noakes’ deeply researched, definitive study admirably steers clear of the biases that have clouded literature on the topic of science and psychical research. He renounces any a priori scepticism that would see the physicists’ engagement as simply misguided, and refrains from any lurid sensationalism around matters that, while undeniably strange, scientists and laypeople took very seriously. Noakes also holds at bay the presentist perspective of current paraphysics which, having embraced the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics, often regards Victorian physics as rigidly materialistic and mechanistic, and unable to accommodate mind and spirit. Instead, Noakes offers a historically sensitive reconstruction of the conditions that made physics important to...