Conclusion

Summary

The conclusion examines the legacy of physical-psychical scientists.By the 1940s even the most sympathetic physical-psychical scientists were ambivalent at best about the ‘psychical’ achievements of Crookes, Lodge and other veteran physical-psychical scientists.From the 1940s until the 1960s very few of the connections between physics and psychics involved the modern physics of relativity and quantum theories; the 1970s, however, saw a rejuvenation of interest in these possibilities, which became a major focus of the new field of ‘paraphysics’ whose theories and practices continue to cause controversy.I argue that the protagonists of this book would have recognised many of the problems faced by practitioners of paraphysics but repudiated these practitioners’ perceptions that Victorian physics was materialistic, rigid and closed to psychical significance.