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Journal of the British Academy, 7, 25–59. DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/007.025
Posted 9 May 2019. © The British Academy 2019

Radical physics:
science, socialism, and the paranormal at
Birkbeck College in the 1970s
Raleigh Lecture on History
read 26 September 2018

JOANNA BOURKE
Fellow of the Academy

Abstract: The 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in the paranormal. In the mass media,
as well as in academic and popular conferences across the world, metal-bending, telep-
athy, clairvoyance, and remote viewing were avidly debated. In Britain, attention to the
paranormal was sparked by visits of Uri Geller. Scientists, and physicists in particular,
sought to explain the phenomena. This article explores the social life of paranormal
science in Birkbeck College in the 1970s and its links to radical critiques of scientific
norms and practices. It traces the scientific and political thinking of physicists as
­different as John Hasted and David Bohm. It explores the importance of quantum
mechanics, as well as leftist politics (membership of the Communist Party of Great
Britain). Paraphysics provided a small group of scientists with a way to reflect on the
three crises of politics emerging out of capitalism, the Cold War, and Stalinism.

Keywords: Paranormal, paraphysics, physics, Birkbeck College, metal-bending, Uri

Geller, David Bohm, John Hasted, quantum mechanics, Communist Party of Great
Britain.

October 1974. Uri Geller—celebrated for his demonstrations of clairvoyance,

­telepathy, teleportation, and ability to bend spoons and keys through the power of
thought alone—was holding a press conference at the Savoy Hotel in London. The
room was buzzing with energy: it was like ‘a revivalist meeting’, observed one
­journalist.1 Although Geller had summoned the press to the hotel in order to launch
his new music record, those who turned up were more interested in his paranormal
proclivities. Sensing scepticism, Geller was bullish, promising journalists that one day

1
The Times (1974: np) and Yorkshire Post (1974: np).
26 Joanna Bourke

he would host a ‘big television spectacular in front of all the top sceptics and scientists
in the world’. This event would ‘settle once and for all the validity of his powers’.
Unfortunately, Geller contended, ‘the presence of conjurors, professional tricksters,
and other “negative” doubting Thomases’ were having an inhibiting impact on his
­psychic energies but
in the long run[,] criticism does not hurt, because scientific tests will eventually justify
me. If you do not believe in what I do, that is your problem.2

At this point in the press conference, there was an unexpected interruption. John
Hasted of Birkbeck College and John Taylor of King’s College London—both highly
respected professors of physics—spontaneously rose from their seats to ‘give testi-
mony to the genuineness of Mr. Geller’. Hasted admitted that ‘scientists should not
do this sort of thing’, but, undeterred, announced that ‘the time has come to stand up
and be counted’. He told the assembled journalists that he had personally tested
Geller’s extraordinary talents in his laboratory at Birkbeck College and swore that
Geller had not been ‘a phoney’. Hasted maintained that he had no explanation for
‘what causes the phenomenon, but I believe in what Uri Geller does. Science will
­discover how he softens metal, though science may be changed in the process’.3
For a respected scientist to make such a pronouncement in 1974 was brave but not
particularly foolhardy. Paranormal shows were popular at the time. Numerous
­academic conferences showcased the phenomenon.4 On stage in France, Jean-Pierre
Girard was wowing audiences by demonstrating his ability to lift objects without
touching them; in Germany, the aptly named Professor Hans Bender was champion-
ing poltergeists and clairvoyants.5 Israel-born Geller was himself a global phenomenon,
appearing on television in the United States, Japan, South Africa, and most European
countries.6 Admittedly, there were some farcical incidents (in Sweden, for example, a
woman who had watched Geller perform his metal-bending exploits on television
accused him of causing the metal birth-control device in her uterus to straighten,
resulting in her pregnancy),7 but there were many believers.
In subsequent decades, historians of science have also shown an interest in the
phenomenon. Most notably, sociologists Trevor J. Pinch and Harry M. Collins used
the phenomenon to reflect on the social construction of scientific knowledge. They
received government grants to establish laboratories engaging in paranormal research,

2
The Times (1974: np).
3
The Times (1974: np) and Yorkshire Post (1974: np).
4
Hackett (1983: 9).
5
Hackett (1983: 9).
6
Hasted (1981: 14).
7
Holroyd (1977: 105).
 Radical physics 27

taking part in experiments as participant observers. Collins and Pinch maintained

that there were no independent scientific criteria or practices capable of judging the
‘truth value’ of any scientific proposition, including paranormal ones. All scientific
‘facts’ were relative; known ‘facts’ about ‘nature’ were nothing more than dominant
paradigms that were shared by members of an intellectual community. Collins and
Pinch applied Thomas Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm conflict’ to the ‘paranormal v.
science’ debate, noting that it was a classic example of two worldviews that were fun-
damentally ‘incommensurable’.8 The dominant scientific community was determined
to ‘legitimate the present orthodoxy’. For Collins and Pinch, the central conundrum
for paraphysicists was simply how to convince other scientists to abandon orthodox
knowledge for their alternative.9
Another aspect of Collins and Pinch’s agenda involved pitting the ‘fraud hypoth-
esis’ (that is, the belief that extraordinary scientific phenomena were the result of
fraudulent practices) against the ‘paranormal hypothesis’ (the observed phenomena
were real, despite not complying with any known scientific law).10 Pinch even insisted
that it was the ‘fraud hypothesis’ that needed to be more thoroughly investigated,
alleging that the accusation of fraud should be ‘rejected as unscientific for the same
sorts of reasons that have been used to reject parapsychology’.11
Although these arguments have been productive in drawing attention to the social
life of science, this article takes a different approach to the paranormal. I focus pri-
marily on paraphysics and psychokinetics, which involve phenomena as diverse as
telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis, the ability to move physical
objects by mental power alone. This article begins by exploring the rise of paranormal
beliefs and research within scientific communities in Britain from the 1970s. It looks
at the prominent role played by scientists at Birkbeck College, the scientific reasons
that made paraphysics plausible, and the subsequent attacks on their scientific rigour.
The article then goes on to ask why paraphysics interested these scientists. I will argue
that it is important to ask why this unfashionable scientific theory was attractive to
these men as scientists.

8
Collins & Pinch (1982: 4 and 11).
9
Pinch (1979: 340).
10
The most notable examples are Pinch (1979), Collins & Pinch (1979), and Collins & Pinch (1982).
11
Pinch (1979: 334–5).
28 Joanna Bourke

PART ONE: INTEREST IN THE PARANORMAL

Geller arrived first in London in October 1972, two years before the press conference
in the Savoy Hotel where he had attempted to launch his record. With the encourage-
ment of his main champion Andrija Puharich, Geller had demonstrated his psychic
powers at the Royal Garden Hotel. Witnesses, including quantum physicist Edward
‘Ted’ Bastin from Cambridge, were smitten. On 23 November 1973, people through-
out the UK echoed Bastin’s amazement when Geller appeared with Professor John
Taylor on The Dimbleby Talk-in show. Geller bent spoons and engaged in other para-
normal tricks on live television, making children, adolescents, and adults watching
from their living room sofas suddenly discover their own hitherto unnoticed paranor-
mal capacities to bend spoons. Almost overnight, metal-bending, telepathy, clairvoyance,
and remote viewing became popular pastimes at parties throughout the UK.
This obsession for all things paranormal had a serious side. It attracted the atten-
tion of the CIA, the Pentagon, and defence laboratories, which were deeply embroiled
in Cold War intrigue. The US Department of Defense, in particular, was nervous
about reports that scientists in the Soviet Union had established scientific programmes
devoted to mind-control and psychic research generally.12 Nikolai Khokhlov, an agent
of the Soviet secret intelligence service, contended that the Soviets had ‘trained a
corps of psychics who could erase information stored on the computer tapes which
control nuclear weapons’.13 In the early 1970s, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder
(both members of the American Society for Psychical Research) were convinced that
‘top-caliber Soviet scientists had already made significant breakthroughs in psychical
research, a field usually ignored by Western science’. Referring to an article by Vladimir
Mutshall in the Foreign Science Bulletin, they maintained that
If the Russian reports are even partly true, and if mind-to-mind thought transference
can be used for such things as interplanetary communication or the guiding of
interplanetary spacecraft, the reports will obviously have overwhelming
­
significance.14

Anxious not to be left behind, the CIA conducted experiments with Geller, who
­managed to convince at least some that his psychic powers were real.15 As a result,
American scientists found themselves awash with government funding to carry out
parapsychological experiments.

12
Kaiser (2011: 65).
13
Grove (1985: 228).
14
Ostrander & Schroeder (1977: 18).
15
Larimer (2017).
 Radical physics 29

In other academic circles, as well, the paranormal was being taken seriously. It
received a major boon in 1969 when eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead con-
vinced the American Association for the Advancement of Science to bestow ‘Associate
status’ on parapsychology. In her preface to a book by Russell Targ and Harold E.
Puthoff, entitled Mind-reach. Scientists Look at Psychic Ability (1977), Mead main-
tained that the authors provided readers with a ‘clear, straightforward account of a set
of successful experiments that demonstrate the existence of “remote viewing”, a
­hither­to unvalidated human capacity’. Her belief in the reality of psychic phenomenon
had been bolstered by the fact that Targ and Puthoff were respectable, university-based
physicists—they were, Mead reminded readers, experts in ‘the hardest of the hard
sciences’. They also did not ‘appear to be … true believers who set out to use science
to validate passionately held beliefs’.16 This was a weighty endorsement from one of
the world’s most highly respected anthropologists. Unfortunately, Targ and Puthoff’s
CIA-sponsored project on ‘remote viewing’ (code named ‘Stargate’) was subsequently
discredited.

PART TWO: THE PARANORMAL AT BIRKBECK

This was the context in which two of the most highly respected physicists in Britain
and based at Birkbeck College decided that the ‘Geller phenomenon’ was worth
exploring. We have already been introduced to the first: John Barrett Hasted, the man
who announced at Geller’s 1974 press conference that ‘the time has come to stand up
and be counted’. Hasted was born into a distinguished, albeit tragic, family. His
mother, who died when he was three weeks old, was the daughter of Field Marshal
Sir Arthur Arnold Barrett. His father was in the army, but committed suicide early in
the Second World War.17 Hasted must have been a lonely child. He boarded at
Winchester College and then studied at New College, Oxford. He specialised in experi­
mental physics, particularly atomic physics and the dielectric and electromagnetic
properties of water. His intellectual reputation took off in 1964, when he published
The Physics of Atomic Collisions. It quickly became a major textbook in the field.
Four years later, in 1968, he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at
Birkbeck and, in 1971, was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He remained
in Birkbeck’s Physics Department until he retired in 1986.
Hasted was more than just a distinguished physicist. He was also a fervent
­communist, active peace campaigner, and prominent folk musician who was widely

16
Mead (1977: xv–xvi). Also see Gardner (1989: 185) and Grove (1985: 226).
17
The Times (2002: 35).
30 Joanna Bourke

credited with having brought skiffle music to Britain. As we shall see, these four
­passions—physics, communism, peace, and folk music—are important elements in
this story.
The other distinguished paraphysicist at Birkbeck was David Bohm. He was a
protégé of Albert Einstein.18 During his lifetime, he was a serious contender for the
Nobel Prize and is still widely thought to be one of the greatest physicists of the 20th
century and a pioneer of the theory of quantum mechanics and the unified theory of
physics.19
Like Hasted, Bohm had been a communist. Indeed, he had been forced to flee the
United States after refusing to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities
Committee. In 1961, after many unsatisfactory years working in physics departments
in São Paulo, Haifa, and Bristol, Bohm was appointed Professor of Theoretical
Physics at Birkbeck, where he remained until he retired in 1987. Like Hasted, he had
an obsession that informed his science: he was fascinated by debates about the nature
of consciousness, influenced by the Indian guru Jiddu Krishnamurti.20
Hasted and Bohm set out to see whether psychic phenomena were ‘real’ and, if so,
what this meant for science. In this, they were following their revolutionary and para-
digm-changing approach in more established physics research. Although their quest
would result in public ridicule and humiliation, Hasted and Bohm were intellectually
committed to unravelling this scientific mystery. Of the two, Hasted was unquestion-
ably the most committed. He insisted that ‘I don’t care if the world believes me or not.
… I only want to get to the bottom of it.’21 He contended that he wanted ‘to find out
and test the accepted laws [of physics] and see whether they need changing’.22 For him,
the issue was simple: ‘I encountered a physical phenomenon which I could not explain’,
and so he set out to make sense of it.23 As Hasted wrote in his Alternative Memoirs
(1992),
If we accept what has always seemed more likely, namely that the universe behaves as
a closed system, then we must be continually watchful for unexpected phenomena,
that is to say, for miracles. It is such discrepancies which offer clues to any deficiencies
in existing theory.

He observed that, in the past, unexplained phenomena were typically ‘attributed to

the action of God’, but that would no longer suffice. Instead, psychic phenomena

18
Freire (2005: 2).
19
Hiley (2013: 13).
20
Bohm (1975: np).
21
Owen (1978: np).
22
Robins (1979: np).
23
Hasted (1992: 181).
 Radical physics 31

offered ‘a possible channel for enlargement’ of knowledge through the construction

of hypotheses, rigorous testing, and careful observation.24 Hasted and Bohm ­admitted
to being ‘Baffled Boffins’,25 but they were confident that through scientific
­experimentation and observation they would find the answer.
Their investigations into the paranormal began in earnest in 1974. On 21 June that
year, Geller walked into their rooms at Birkbeck. Also present were Bastin and
Brendan O’Regan from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a parapsychological research
institute, author Arthur Koestler, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, physicist
Keith Birkinshaw,26 and theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti, who had been a research
fellowship at Birkbeck but was also a member of the American counterculture
Fundamental Fysiks Group. Under close scrutiny, Geller bent four keys and a molyb-
denum disc. He caused half of a disc of vanadium carbide, a substance as hard and
brittle as thin glass, to disappear.27 He also triggered a Geiger counter to jump dra-
matically and deflected a compass needle while at the same time producing a pulse on
a magnetometer.28 Hasted found in these experiments ‘strong evidence that the energy
bursts were electrical in origin’. Geller, he believed ‘was not producing radio-activity
but electrical pulses. In fact, Uri himself seemed to suffer some kind of electric shock.
I’m convinced the effects were genuine. We have gone well beyond bending keys.’29
Hasted announced that ‘these observations are consistent with the hypothesis that
Mr Geller could by concentration produce occasional and rather unpredictable pulses
of electromotive force’.30
Bohm was impressed, but much more cautious. ‘Unfortunately, there were a lot of
people in the room’, he conceded, adding that ‘as far as the key bending is concerned,
we had much better conditions in his hotel room [in February 1974] where it was much
quieter’. He acknowledged that he could not be certain that ‘there were no tricks’
because Geller ‘works in a very high state of excitement which communicates to the
experimenter, and that makes it hard to keep your mind on what is happening’.31 In a
statement that was to be echoed repeatedly by proponents of paranormal activity,
Bohm reminded sceptics that paranormal effects required a particular state of mind.
Subjecting Geller to a body-search prior to the experiments would be counterpro­
ductive, Bohm believed, because ‘it would put him off’.32 Geller also ‘tends to get
24
Hasted (1992: 181).
25
Hasted (1992: 181).
26
He was present according to Sarfatti (1974: 46).
27
Holroyd (1977: 107).
28
New Scientist (1974: np).
29
Stockdill (1974: np).
30
New Scientist (1974: np).
31
New Scientist (1974: np).
32
New Scientist (1974: np).
32 Joanna Bourke

­ iscouraged by complicated set-ups’, he noted, adding that ‘We had some set-ups that
d
would have given stronger proof, but he was never in the right state of mind.’33 All in
all, Bohm concluded, ‘My attitude is that whatever he requires, we must accept.’34
The following day, Geller was subjected to yet more tests. The room was crowded.
Not only were Hasted, Bohm, Clarke, Sarfatti, and Koestler present, but also
­distinguished rocket engineer Arthur Valentine Cleaver, engineer and ­president of the
Society of Psychical Research Arthur Ellison, and American concert pianist Byron
Janis with his wife, the artist Maria Cooper Janis. Once again, Geller elicited a ‘very
strong burst from a Geiger counter tube that he held in his hand’.35 Koestler was
reported to be visibly shaken after the burst because he had felt a ‘strong sensation
simultaneous with the Geiger tube burst’.36 Sarfatti concluded that
My personal professional judgment as a Ph.D. physicist is that Geller demonstrated
genuine psycho-energetic ability at Birkbeck, which is beyond the doubt of any
­reasonable man, under relatively well controlled and repeatable experimental condi-
tions. While the experimental conditions were not perfect, the events at Birkbeck do
represent a major step forward in the new field of experimental psycho-energies.37

Clarke belligerently ‘challenged any magician to “put up or shut up” in regard to

duplicating Geller’s feat under identical conditions’.38
Hasted also conducted experiments with Geller in the stately home of Langley
House in Wiltshire, where Geller’s powers were so great that one of Hasted’s cufflinks
broke.39 In another experiment, a ‘crystal of vanadium carbide, a rare and very hard
metal, was placed inside a cellulose capsule and laid on a piece of metal in front of
witnesses’. Hasted swore that
Geller never went nearer than eight inches to it, and I put my hand between his hand
and the crystal. As Geller moved his hand above mine, I felt a tingling sensation in my
hand. Suddenly the capsule gave a little jump. We looked at the capsule—and only
half of the crystal was there.40

Hasted confessed that domestic tensions arose when Geller visited his home. In the
presence of Hasted and his wife, objects moved between rooms and a clock that had
been silent for thirty years suddenly chimed. Hasted’s wife (who had been ‘deeply
dismissive’ of the paranormal prior to Geller’s visit) became ‘increasingly frightened’

33
New Scientist (1974: np).
34
New Scientist (1974: np).
35
Sarfatti (1974: 46).
36
Sarfatti (1974: 46).
37
Sarfatti (1974: 46).
38
Sarfatti (1974: 46).
39
Birmingham Post (1975: np).
40
Rolph (nd: np).
 Radical physics 33

when poltergeist-type phenomena took place.41 Hasted admitted that it was ‘a hard
time for my wife and myself—we nearly fell out. We really had quite serious emotional
troubles about it.’42
Domestic tensions aside, Hasted and Bohm announced that the ‘human mind’ was
capable of ‘distorting matter on the atomic and molecular level through activity
patterns of the brain’. They were confident that the data they and other physicists
­

were collecting would eventually be so extensive that there would be ‘no room for
reasonable doubt that some new process is involved here, which cannot be accounted
for or explained in terms of present known laws of physics’.43 Bohm’s earlier caution
was also thrown to the wind. When he was finally allowed to return to the United
States in 1977, he told a packed Berkeley physics audience of the results of these
Birkbeck experiments with the ‘psychic wunderkind, Uri Geller’. As one commenta-
tor noted, the ‘much-revered quantum physicist held up several pieces of bent metal
for his audience of fellow physicists to eagerly peruse’ and ‘For a moment the unthink-
able seemed thinkable—that the paradoxes of quantum mechanics might be c­ onnected
to the field of parapsychology.’44
Unfortunately for the two Birkbeck scientists, Geller was more interested in his
lucrative career as a media personality than serving as an unpaid experimental subject
for university physicists. Luckily for them, others proved willing. Hasted and Bohm
turned their keen intellects to ‘mini-Gellers’ (in Italian, known as ‘Gellerini’),45 young
people who claimed to be able to replicate Geller’s paranormal feats. These ‘mini-
Gellers’ were able to bend metal, scrunch paperclips, levitate, move objects, view
objects in remote places, take ‘thought-photographs’ (that is, produce photographic
images on light-sensitive film by paranormal means), communicate with people in
other countries as well as in UFO spaceships, read minds, predict future events, and
summon poltergeists.46 Hasted and Taylor eventually identified forty-six people with
metal-bending powers in Britain,47 and Hasted was able to document psychic
­capabilities in at least eighteen children.48
Fifteen-year-old Julie Knowles and ten-year-old Stephen North were two of these
extraordinary children. Julie was a pupil at St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic School in
Trowbridge. Like nearly all ‘mini-Gellers’, she had discovered her psychic powers
while watching Geller on television.49 Initially, she caught the attention of researchers

41
Margolis (1998: 213).
42
Margolis (1998: 213).
43
Daily Mail (1975: np).
44
Pinch (2011: 435).
45
Hasted (1981: 29).
46
For details, see Hasted (1981: throughout).
47
Holroyd (1977: 108).
48
Hasted (1981: 30).
49
Reveille (1976: np).
34 Joanna Bourke

at the nearby University of Bath. However, under experimental conditions, Julie failed
to bend any spoons, despite the fact that her mother swore that Julie had bent two
spoons just prior to entering the laboratory. Her mother explained the discrepancy by
maintaining that her daughter ‘didn’t like the conditions in the laboratory. She can’t
bend things on demand, she has to feel in the mood.’50
This was where Hasted stepped in. He contended that a ‘genuine spontaneous
physical phenomenon’ was ‘being killed off by the continued insistence by psycholo-
gists and others on “performance” under video tests with complicated protocol’. He
believed this was unnecessary since ‘all that is really needed is to record instrumental
data’ in the relaxed environment of a home.51 He invited Julie into his home to meet
Geller: in that relaxed environment, she was easily able to complete a psychic test,
which was ‘witnessed carefully by a number of scientists’.52
Under Hasted’s casual experimental conditions, Julie flourished. After all, she
explained, ‘I have to be in the mood to do it and it holds me back if I sense there is
someone pesant [sic] who does not believe it.’53 In one experiment, a ‘T-shaped strip
made of drinking straws was placed on a plastic base floating in a glass of water’ and
the whole ‘apparatus was covered by a sealed glass dome’. In front of six witnesses,
Julie ‘concentrated from a distance’ and ‘slowly, she swivelled the strip through
85 degrees’.54 A few minutes after picking up a teaspoon, Julie
said she had a ‘feeling’… she had a pain at the top of her right arm and then felt water
and wax as she was rubbing the spoon. The moment she said wax, the bowl of the
spoon bent downwards sharply.55

Julie’s powers extended beyond revolving drinking straws and bending spoons. She
claimed to be able to ‘listen in to the conversations extraterrestrial beings have in their
flying saucers’, although she confessed that ‘it didn’t make any sense’.56 On one occa-
sion, she ‘even met herself in the street’ and, looking down, observed that ‘it was all
misty round my feet’.57 Julie also had premonitions. She predicted ‘major world
events’, specifically the Chinese earthquake in the summer of 1976 and the Moroccan
invasion of the Spanish Sahara.58 After such feats, she would be ravenously hungry.59

50
Greenwood (1976: np).
51
Hasted (1977: np).
52
Greenwood (1976: np).
53
Greenwood (1976: np).
54
Reveille (1976: np).
55
Greenwood (1976: np).
56
Reveille (1976: np).
57
Reveille (1976: np).
58
Reveille (1976: np).
59
Greenwood (1976: np).
 Radical physics 35

Hasted maintained that he was ‘absolutely convinced [that] she is absolutely genuine’,
although he admitted that he was struggling to find any scientific explanations for her
powers. He did speculate, however, that ‘it involves the dematerialisation of matter—
rather like the transporter system on sicence [sic] fiction films’.60
Stephen North, from Cranley Gardens, Highgate, north London, was another
­talented youngster.61 Stephen was ten-years-old when, while eating dinner, he saw
Geller performing on television. Suddenly, he later recalled, his spoon snapped in his
hand. Imitating Geller, Stephen began stroking his fork, which also promptly cracked
into two pieces. His father, Arthur, a university senior lecturer in architecture, initially
believed that Stephen was ‘playing a joke on us. … But when we stood him in the
­middle of the room, watching him every minute, he still bent every piece of cutlery we
gave him.’62 While writing a school essay on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, Stephen used
thought alone to bend a piece of metal to resemble a crown; he also used his mind to
bend three strips of metal into a bracelet for his mother.63 Stephen professed to be
bewildered about his newly found powers. He bragged that
In the first year everything around me seemed to bend, whether I wanted it to or not.
… We didn’t have a straight door key in the house. My mother wasn’t a bit pleased
when her egg-whisk twisted up and when all the pins in her sewing box curled around
one another.

Gradually, Stephen gained some control over his powers, but ‘even so, if I have a row
with my mother, a few things in the kitchen tend to curl up!’64
Stephen worked with Hasted for around five years. It was found that he could
remove money from sealed boxes, making it reappear in his back pocket although
‘neither of them saw it vanish or re-appear’.65 Stephen could also ‘create electrical
interference in television sets’. He was telepathic, communicating with a young
German girl living in Russia.66 Even Geller conceded that Stephen might have ‘stron-
ger teleportation powers than I have. … I think the younger you are, the less sceptical
you are. If you believe you can do these things, then it makes the power you have
stronger.’67

60
Greenwood (1976: np).
61
A clip of Stephen North can be seen in ‘Psychokinetic Metal Bending’, on the Discovery Channel: a
section is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPrJ1pSP2UI.
62
Robins (1979: np).
63
Robins (1979: np).
64
Robins (1979: np).
65
Robins (1979: np).
66
McShane (1979: np) and Robins (1979: np).
67
McShane (1979: np).
36 Joanna Bourke

PART THREE: QUANTUM MECHANICS

But what could be the explanation of such strange powers? Here, Bohm and Hasted
turned to quantum mechanics. They believed the clue lay in the famous paradox elu-
cidated by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in 1935. Known as the
EPR paradox (after the first initial in their names), it postulated that, theoretically at
least, quantum information could ‘be transferred instantaneously from one part of
the universe to another part, no matter how remote: in brief, an action at a distance is
in principle possible’.68 In his book Mind-benders, Hasted explained how this might
work. He began by making a distinction between mind and brain. ‘Unlike the rest of
matter’, Hasted believed, mind has ‘characteristics which are apparently trans-spatial
and trans-temporal’.69 He alluded to Bohm’s theory of ‘hidden variables’, which
‘determine the indeterminate quantities but at the same time conform to the probabil-
ity distribution’.70 Although no one had found these ‘hidden variables’, Hasted
believed that ‘we are now coming increasingly to believe that the mind is the only
remaining undiscovered hidden variable’.71 Quantum theory allowed for ‘the reality of
simultaneous universes’ which ‘cannot communicate physically with each other,
because the vectors are mutually orthogonal’.72 These simultaneous universes were
constantly ‘splitting … into an infinite (or very large) number [of other universes] each
time an observed quantum transition occurs’.73 This was Bryce DeWitt’s proposition.
For DeWitt,
The universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous number of branches, all r­ esulting
from the measurement-like interactions between its myriads of components. Moreover,
every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote
­corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of copies of
itself.74

These two ideas were ‘uncomfortable’ for physics. As Hasted admitted, ‘We do not like
the idea of countless … doppelgängers of ourselves, increasing in number all the time,
even if they can never communicate physically’ (although he held open the possibility
of telepathic communication).75 This ‘many-universes theory’ suggested that ‘each

68
Grove (1985: 227).
69
Hasted (1981: 2).
70
Hasted (1981: 240).
71
Hasted (1981: 240).
72
Hasted (1981: 241).
73
Hasted (1981: 241).
74
Hasted (1981: 241).
75
Hasted (1981: 241). For a largely positive review of this idea of ‘many selves’, see Parker (1981: 13).
 Radical physics 37

atomic transition in our own insignificant bodies causes the remotest galaxies to split
into an infinite number’.76
In attempting to understand psychic phenomena, these scientists believed that
‘non-material, or at least trans-spatial minds’ were productive.77 Hasted speculated
that ‘the unconscious mind possesses the faculty of receiving “trans-spatial” informa-
tion from the corresponding minds in other “universes”.’ Because, in Euclidean space,
two vectors are orthogonal (their dot product is zero), ‘physical signals cannot pass
from one universe to another’, so the ‘unconscious mind’ must be assumed to possess
‘trans-spatial properties’ and be ‘able to communicate with physical reality in other
universes only through other unconscious minds’. He asked scientists to consider the
possibility of ‘parallel universes’, in which there are ‘millions of copies of each indi-
vidual’, all conducting ‘parallel existences, but … entirely isolated physically from
each other by orthogonality, which prevents the passage of physical signals between
universes’. Concretely, what would this mean? Hasted provided an example:
Let us propose that each one of these individuals possesses his own mind, and that
communication between these corresponding minds is sometimes possible. No indi-
vidual knows of the existence of his many alter egos. But if he were able to adopt the
mind of one of these alter egos, he would then take the other universe to be his reality,
without knowing that any change had occurred. Moreover, at the moment he success-
fully does this, one might suppose that his neighbours’ minds (the observers’ minds)
could also come to be dominated by those of their own alter egos, so that they could
also take the other universe to be their reality. All observers could now notice what-
ever physical differences there might be between the two universes. The differences
could be that psychic phenomenon, metal-bending, psychokinesis or teleportations
have taken place.78

This was the simplified model. After all, there was no need to assume that there were
only two universes. It was also possible to ‘propose that we all pass through life in a
continual state of subtending many universes at the same moment of time’ and ‘since
these universes are in nearly all respects identical, we have hitherto imagined them to
be a single universe’. On extremely rare occasions, this illusion could be breached
when, for example, ‘a unique universe forces us to notice it, and it is then that we say
that an atomic physical phenomenon has occurred’.79
Accordingly, teleportation could be understood by ‘using the hyperdimensional
character of the many-universes model’.80 The ‘reorganizational forces which must

76
Hasted (1981: 244).
77
Hasted (1981: 244).
78
Hasted (1981: 244).
79
Hasted (1981: 245).
80
Hasted (1981: 245).
38 Joanna Bourke

occur in the creation or annihilation of atoms at the inter-universe boundaries’ could

explain metal-bending.81 Other ‘quasi-forces’ could be interpreted ‘in terms of a rapid
series of local transformations into universes, each one with its own individual
momentum, each slightly greater than the last. The rate of change of momentum
would then have the appearance of a force acting on the transformed subject.’82
It was a complex model that also helped explain phenomena like teleportation. As
Hasted explained,
when metal bends, atoms move about in the metal, and if enough atoms move around,
then the whole object could jump, and this would be teleportation—which I now
believe to be merely another branch of metal-bending. In fact, teleportation is
­probably the more fundamental event.

In other words, teleportation was ‘another demonstration of quantum non-locality’

or ‘being in two places at once, things not moving, but just appearing, going through
walls’. Even if the science was not fully understood yet, he insisted that teleportation
was possible: it has ‘been my experience. I have seen it happen.’83

PART FOUR: CRITICS AND DEFENCES

Neither the experiments nor the theory convinced sceptics. In 1977, a Committee for
the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal was established. The com-
mittee was criticised for ‘gnat-killing by sledgehammer’.84 However, the scientists,
­science reporters, and magicians who joined deemed it necessary, given the number of
respected physicists who were publicly endorsing paranormal phenomena.
Journalists also began registering their doubts. In 1974, the New Scientist ­published
an attack by journalist Joseph Hanlon, who had a doctorate in physics. How could
John Taylor seriously inform the audience watching The Dimbleby Talk-in that there
was no scientific explanation for Geller’s ability to bend the forks, he asked? After all,
Geller had unguarded access to the forks prior to the programme.85 Hanlon main-
tained that ‘so long as a good magician could do what Geller does, then the Geller
effect is not scientifically validated’.86 Fraud ‘permeates psychic research’, Hanlon
insisted. Hasted’s comment that ‘I have no personal interest in proving that the

81
Hasted (1981: 245).
82
Hasted (1981: 245–6).
83
Margolis (1998: 214).
84
Science News (1977: 118).
85
Hanlon (1974: 314).
86
Hanlon (1974: 314).
 Radical physics 39

­ henomena produced by Uri Geller are genuine. ... My only intention is to inquire
p
and see whether or not we can learn something’ was, at best, naïve and, at worse,
duplicitous.87
Hasted was unrepentant. He chided Hanlon for basing his article on a preliminary
report which had not been intended for publication. If Hanlon had talked to him, he
would have been informed that the room in which the experiments had taken place
was not always crowded. A ‘sleight of hand’ on Geller’s part would ‘not have been
possible’ on every occasion.88 Hasted reminded Hanlon that he was a highly trained
physicist, with well-honed observatory skills: how dare Hanlon attempt to ‘bring into
disrepute the whole process of laboratory training’. ‘Unlike Dr Hanlon’, Hasted dryly
commented, ‘I am prepared to comment only on events I have personally witnessed’.
He was ‘confident of the abilities of scientists to make observations [and] to avoid
writing [Geller] off as a subject because some of his performances are suspect’.89
If Hasted thought that this would end the matter, he was wrong. Worse was to
come. Popular science magazines smelled blood. Scientific American called Hasted a
‘self-deceiver’, who was starring in a ‘Mathematical Circus’. The author of the article
mocked Hasted for experimenting with
young people who can, if they are not watched, somehow pass distorted paper clips
into a sealed glass globe. Well, not quite sealed; you do need to leave a small hole, or
curiously the parapsychological effect does not work!90

It was a point picked up by Martin Gardner in Science. Good, Bad and Bogus (1989).
He ridiculed Hasted for claiming that one of his ‘mini-Gellers’ could ‘scrunch up’
paper clips that were inside a glass globe. The problem, Gardner scoffed, was that the
globe had a hole in the top. He asked whether ‘anyone [has] actually seen paper clips
in the act of bending, or recorded it on a videotape?’ The answer was clearly ‘No’. A
‘mini-Geller’ was allowed to take the globe home ‘and comes back with the scrunch’.
‘Mysteriously’, Gardner noted, ‘clips never scrunch in globes without holes or when
someone other than the child is watching’.91 Gardner accused Hasted of ‘boundless
gullibility and bumbling experiments’. He was ‘embarrassing … his Birkbeck
­colleagues’.92 Unfortunately, the latter comment seems to have been true.93

87
Hanlon (1974: 314).
88
Hasted (1974: np).
89
Hasted (1974: np).
90
Morrison (1981: 41).
91
Gardner (1989: 205).
92
Gardner (1989: 205).
93
Hasted (1975: 4) and personal interview with Hiley (29 June 2018).
40 Joanna Bourke

When a group of physicists defended the experiments in The New York Review of
Books, claiming that these physicists’ research demonstrated ‘a possible connection
between quantum mechanics and parapsychology’,94 Gardner responded with yet
more ridicule. Hasted’s research was ‘hilarious’, he contended. At the very basic level,
Hasted had ‘failed to take into account amplification by his sensitive strain gauges of
slight static charges produced by body movements’. Gardner asked readers to ‘judge
for themselves whether Hasted is a competent psychic investigator’.95
Magicians joined in the debunking. After all, they were perfectly capable of
­replicating the ‘tricks’ of Geller and co.96 The fact that Geller was never able to p
­ erform
if he knew that a magician would be present was widely considered to be suspect.97
This reticence on Geller’s part led magician Michael Nass to call for a ‘battle of the
psychics’, confident that magicians would ‘easily win’.98
Illusionist James Randi was a particularly dogged opponent. He promised a
­substantial sum of money to anyone who could demonstrate verifiable paranormal
capabilities.99 Randi also set up a simple spoon-bending experiment with ‘mini-Geller’
Julie Knowles: she failed. To Randi’s astonishment, he then discovered that no one
had actually seen Julie execute her psychic powers despite the fact that her feats had
been widely publicised for more than three years.100
In 1975, Randi was responsible for Sarfatti’s very public retraction of his endorse-
ment of Geller’s ‘psychoenergetic authenticity’, which he had made at Birkbeck just
the previous year. Randi had showed Sarfatti how conjurors were able to ‘fracture
metal and move the hands of a watch in a way that is indistinguishable from my obser-
vation of Geller’s ‘psychokinetic’ demonstrations’.101 Sarfatti remained convinced that
‘the ambiguity in the interpretation of quantum mechanics leaves ample room for the
possibility of psychokinetic and telepathic effects’. However, he maintained that the
psychic effects he had witnessed at Birkbeck had not occurred ‘under controlled and
reproducible conditions’.102
Most damningly, evidence of fraud began to emerge. Collins and Pinch set up
paranormal experiments at the University of Bath (where Julie had failed to bend a
spoon), but a one-way mirror (which was there without the knowledge of the

94
de Beauregard et al. (1980: np).
95
Gardner (1980: np).
96
Wolansky (1974: 78).
97
Gerrish & Okulewicz (1974: 78).
98
Nass (1974: 79).
99
Hackett (1983: 9).
100
Randi (1977: 44–5).
101
Sarfatti (1975: 355). The endorsement had been published in Off the Beat (1974: 46).
102
Sarfatti (1975: 355).
 Radical physics 41

‘­mini-Gellers’) showed all of them, except Julie, cheating.103 The ‘mini-Gellers’ were
bending metal with the help of table tops and chair-legs.104
Hasted and Bohm remained defiant, but the relentless tsunami of ridicule must
have been painful. As early as April 1975, Hasted, Bohm, Bastin, and O’Regan hit
back in the pages of Nature. They implored scientists to maintain an open mind as to
whether there was some ‘force, energy or mode of connection’ that was ‘at present
unknown’.105 After all, they reminded critics, ‘when magnetic and electrostatic effects
were first observed’, it had also been ‘impossible to account for them in terms of the
known forces’.106
While admitting that their experiments with Geller and the ‘mini-Gellers’ were not
‘loop-hole-free’, they nevertheless insisted that ‘the experiences we have gained may
be of value to other physicists interested, like ourselves, in the interactions between
mind and physical systems’.107 They repeatedly stated that paranormal research could
not be conducted along conventional lines because ‘the phenomenon under investiga-
tion’ had to ‘be produced from the minds of one or more of those who participate’.108
Therefore, the relationship between all participants was crucial if anything extraor­
dinary was to be observed.109 This did not mean that everyone in the laboratory had
to be believers, but they did have to ensure that their minds remained ‘open to all
­possibilities’.110 Rigour was crucial but, equally, any ‘preconceived pattern of
tough-mindedness’ could ‘destroy the very possibility of the phenomenon that we
wish to study’.111 The ‘entire process’ was more likely to succeed ‘when all those ­present
actively want things to work well’ and when the ‘experimental arrangement is aesthet-
ically or imaginatively appealing to the person with apparent psychokinetic
powers’.112
Hasted, Bohm, Bastin, and O’Regan pleaded with fellow scientists to remember
that negative energies, such as ‘tension, fear, hostility’, had no place in the laboratory.
They observed that any

103
Pamplin & Collins (1975: 8). Collins & Pinch (1979: 259–62) showed that parapsychological
­communities were open in exposing fraud within their own midst.
104
For Hasted’s view, see Hasted (1981: 28). He used it as an argument against testing the ‘mini-Gellers’
in a laboratory because it may them too anxious to ‘achieve success’.
105
Hasted et al. (1975: 471).
106
Hasted et al.(1975: 471).
107
Hasted et al. (1975: 470).
108
Hasted et al. (1975: 470).
109
Hasted et al. (1975: 470).
110
Hasted et al. (1975: 470).
111
Hasted et al. (1975: 470).
112
Hasted et al. (1975: 470).
42 Joanna Bourke

attempt to concentrate strongly in order to obtain a desired result (the bending of a

piece of metal, for example) tends to interfere with the relaxed state of mind needed
to produce such phenomena. It appears that what is actually done is mainly a function
of the unconscious mind, and that once the intention to do something has been firmly
established, the conscious functions of the mind … tend to become more of a
­hindrance than a help. Indeed, we have sometimes found it useful at this stage to talk
of or think about something not closely related to what is happening.113

They pointed out that this was akin to what happens when people tried too hard to get
to sleep. Concentrating on falling asleep was similarly guaranteed to inhibit it.
Of course, they conceded, there was no point denying that fraudsters existed. And
it may have been easier for cheats to fool physicists rather than trained magicians.
However, in answer to the criticism that they should therefore allow professional
magicians into the laboratory, they gave two responses. First, magicians were gener-
ally hostile to psychics, so they created tension in the laboratory that would inhibit
unusual energies.114 Second, the ‘corpus of tricks’ available to a skilled magician was
always evolving, so inviting comments by magicians would never remove the possibil-
ity that the person claiming paranormal abilities had simply invented a trick to which
other magicians were not yet privy.115 They insisted that it was more rational to trust
the vigilance of scientists who had extensive training in close observation.
Meanwhile, Hasted braced himself for being ‘cold shouldered by the academic top
dogs’.116 He claimed that his treatment amounted to a ‘witch-hunt’.117 Bohm eventu-
ally dropped away, persuaded by fellow physicists at Birkbeck that paranormal
research was damaging his reputation. His friend and collaborator, Basil Hiley,
recalled attending protracted meetings at Birkbeck where colleagues debated whether
Hasted should be silenced. Hiley believed that Hasted’s experiments were ‘sloppy’ and
lacked rigour. He was also ‘worried about the potential damage to the well-being of
the children involved particularly with the surrounding publicity’. In the end, how-
ever, the department concluded that academic freedom should be defended even in the
face of the most uncomfortable mockery.118
It was patently obvious that Hasted’s views could never be reconciled with those
of the vast majority of other scientists. As Collins and Pinch put it in their Kuhnian-
informed analysis in Frames of Meaning (1982), the scientific paradigm emerging
from research on paranormal metal bending was incommensurate with that of

113
Hasted et al. (1975: 470).
114
Hasted et al. (1975: 472).
115
Hasted et al. (1975: 471).
116
Kretzmer (1981: 19) and Cowley (1981: 199). The quotation is from the Horizon programme.
117
Hasted (1975: 4).
118
Personal interview and email exchange with Hiley, 29 June 2018 and 8 October 2018.
 Radical physics 43

­orthodox science.119 Hasted accepted his outsider status. With dogged chutzpah, he
accepted invitations to speak at seminars about ‘Scientific Controversies’,120 defended
the proposition that ‘parapsychology is a proper subject for scientific investigation’ on
You the Jury (Radio 4),121 and even appeared on the Horizon programme ‘No One Will
Take Me Seriously’ (BBC2).122
Hasted was not the only one who felt that his ‘star was waning’. He observed that
the number of people with psychic powers was also in a steep decline. Metal-bending,
Hasted was later to reflect, was becoming ‘an endangered talent, at risk of dying out
in the world’.123 How could this be explained? Obviously, the relentless sneers were
powerful disincentives to ‘coming out’. Absurd claims by enthusiasts such as Andrija
Puharich that Geller had been transported to Earth by extraterrestrials also didn’t
help.124
In addition, and much to Hasted’s dismay, the ‘mini-Gellers’ seemed to be ­‘growing
out’ of it. Bending spoons and keys were not glamorous adolescent pastimes. When
Julie Knowles entered her teenage years, she became increasingly uncomfortable
about being stopped in the street by strangers asking her to bend their keys. She was
indignant about accusations that she was making money from her notoriety.125 Julie
had been ‘a real Top of the Pops girl before it all happened’, recalled her mother,
­adding that, since revealing her paranormal talents, people were looking at her as
though she was ‘not quite normal’. There was ‘tremendous pressure on her to prove
herself’, her mother noted. Was it really surprising that she ‘gets really cross when
people disbelieve her and sometimes she has got so fed up that she doesn’t want to do
it any more?’126 Stephen North underwent a similar transformation. At the age of
­fifteen, five years after discovering his powers, Stephen became weary of attempting
to prove this authenticity to his disbelieving school friends. Strumming his guitar was
a much more agreeable pastime.127
The political context was also changing. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power
in 1985 and the Cold War started to wind down, there was less need to cultivate
­paranormal energies capable of stopping The Bomb in its tracks. The McCarthyist
witch-hunts that had brought men like Bohm to Birkbeck were over. Hasted remained

119
Collins & Pinch (1982: 5 and 11).
120
Review (1984: 36).
121
The Times (1984: 31). The programme was You the Jury, chaired by Geoffrey Robertson. Professor
Eric Ash opposed the motion.
122
Horizon’s ‘No One Will Take Me Seriously’ (BBC2), reported in The Times (1981: 23).
123
Hasted (1981: 255).
124
Parker (1981: 13).
125
Greenwood (1976: np).
126
Greenwood (1976: np).
127
Robins (1979: np).
44 Joanna Bourke

a believer until the end of his days, but Bohm moved the focus of his attention to the
ideas of Krishnamurti, which provided a parallel way of making sense of multiple
universes, non-locality, and the enfoldment of all life.

PART FIVE: OUTSIDER STATUS, PERSONAL AMBITION, AND

INSTITUTIONAL LOCATION

Why did paraphysics become prominent in the first place—and especially in i­ nstitutions
like Birkbeck College? To answer this question, we might mention three things: the
proponents’ outsider status, their ambition, and the institutional milieu. Although
each have some validity, I will go on to argue that it is more convincing to see para-
physics as providing these scientists with a radical, dialectical solution to the three
crises of politics emerging out of capitalism, the Cold War, and the Stalinist
International.
Hasted and Bohm were professional, social, and political outsiders. Both ­physicists
struggled with a tension between identity and power. They were the embodiment of
powerful, highly educated, white male elites. But by immersing themselves in s­ cientific,
cultural, and political subcultures not endorsed by dominant paradigms, they also
epitomised subaltern identities.128 Their orthodox scientific research at the frontiers of
existing knowledge familiarised them to incredulous responses from fellow scientists.
They believed passionately that nothing should be ‘off limits’: they sought to move
the boundaries of what it was possible to think. This was why Bohm never censored
Hasted, even after he became embarrassed by his obsessiveness. In this sense, they
represented the modernist belief not to leave anything unexamined and to test all
­theories, conjectures, and refutations.
Their politics followed their scientific radicalism. Hasted’s communist involve-
ment cost him a job in Oxford: the politically conservative physicist Frederick
Alexander Lindemann was happy to support him in junior roles, but would never
promote him.129 Bohm was literally a political refugee. Despite strong support from
Robert Oppenheimer, Bohm’s leftwing views meant that he was not given security
clearance to work on the Manhattan Project. At Princeton University, Bohm worked
closely with Albert Einstein, but the university failed to renew his contract after he
refused to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He
had been forced to leave America, for São Paulo, Haifa, Bristol, and then Birkbeck.

128
Chakrabarty (2000: 101).
129
Hasted (1992: 84).
 Radical physics 45

Socially, too, Bohm and Hasted were often on the ‘wrong side’ of fashionable
trends. Hasted was a leading promoter of skiffle at a time when ‘pop’ was on the rise.
Similarly, Bohm’s infatuation with Krishnamurti raised eyebrows.
Their radicalism was fuelled by excessive ambition. On the first page of The Metal-
benders (1981), Hasted puts himself in the same company as scientific luminaries such
as the founder of modern chemistry Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday (the greatest
experimental physicist of the 19th century), the influential Victorian naturalist Alfred
Russel Wallace, German physicist Heinrich Friedrich Weber, chemist and physicist­
Sir William Crookes, Lord Rayleigh (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1904), and French
­physicist Paul Langevin.130 Cynics gossiped that Bohm and Hasted were hopeful of
becoming Nobel Laureates. Indeed, Hasted openly admitted to this ambition.131
More important was the institutional milieu they worked in. Birkbeck’s i­ ntellectual
tradition cultivated radical thought. Only three years after the establishment of the
London Mechanics’ Institution (now, Birkbeck) in 1823, ‘alternative’ scientific teach-
ings such as phrenology had a prominent place in the college. Johann Caspar
Spurzheim’s 1826 lectures were intensely popular and, despite being denounced for
being ‘atheistic’ and ‘dangerous’,132 phrenological science continued to be taught at
the institution well after it had been dismissed as ‘quackery’ elsewhere.
Spiritualism also had a long tradition at Birkbeck. Hasted, as well as many others,
acknowledged that paraphysics was the late-20th-century successor to spiritualism.133
Both ‘sciences’ believed that remote viewing, levitation, poltergeists, and communica-
tion across time and space were plausible. The 19th and early-20th-century ­spiritualists
had attracted the interest of major scientists of the time, including William Ramsay
(who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1904) and Sir J. J. Thomson (Nobel Prize in
Physics, 1906), as well as three of the scientists Hasted viewed as his precursors
(Wallace, Crookes, and Rayleigh).134 Like Hasted and Bohm, these scientists were all
obsessed with the ‘laws of nature’ that science had yet to discover. Indeed, the Society
for Psychical Research, which had been established in 1882 by spiritualists in
Cambridge,135 published and promoted the paranormal research of both Hasted and
Bohm.136
From the mid-20th century, Birkbeck had also been the home to Samuel George
Soal, mathematician and then Honorary Fellow in Birkbeck’s Psychology Department

130
Hasted (1981: 1).
131
Hasted (1992: 182–3). He makes an identical statement in Margolis (1998: 213).
132
Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (1840: 511–13).
133
Hasted (1981: 25–6).
134
Grove (1985: 225).
135
Grove (1985: 226).
136
Grove (1985: 226).
46 Joanna Bourke

from 1954 to 1958. Soal and Kathleen M. (‘Mollie’) Goldney (President of the Society
for Psychical Research and midwife) carried out experiments claiming to prove the
existence of extrasensory perception (ESP).137 Unfortunately, what subsequently
became known as the Soal/Goldney controversy was a reference to the fraudulent
nature of their evidence. At Birkbeck, Soal continued to conduct paranormal experi-
ments, desperate to prove that the phenomena existed. When spiritualism was b ­ olstered
by tsunamis of grief arising out of the First World War, prominent Birkbeck academ-
ics (such as Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, first female Professor of Botany, and Cyril Joad,
first Head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology) were keen followers.138
Birkbeck’s receptivity to alternative science was matched by its long-standing
encouragement of radical politics. From its conception, the college was a centre for
Marxist social science. Indeed, the writings of Thomas Hodgskin—one of its found-
ers in 1823—were crucial in the development of Karl Marx’s labour theory of value
in the third volume of Capital.
In Hasted’s and Bohm’s time, the Departments of Physics and Crystallography
were the ‘stomping ground’ of J. D. Bernal, one of the most influential scientists of the
century and a fervent Communist. It is often claimed, incorrectly, that to be appointed
to a position in either of these departments at Birkbeck, a person had to be a signed-up
member of the Communist Party. In fact, one of the reasons both Hasted and Bohm
accepted positions in the college was because of ‘The Sage’. They were particularly
inspired by Bernal’s The Social Function of Science (1939).139 As Hasted noted, Bernal
was ‘centrally connected with the material origins of life’: he was a ‘scientist’s scien-
tist’.140 Birkbeck’s Common Room during this period was dominated by the likes of
great, radical scholars such as Bernal, crystallographer Alan Mackay, historian Eric
Hobsbawm, classicist Robert Browning, and art historian Nikolaus Pevsner.141

PART SIX: CRITIQUING SCIENCE AND POLITICS

Hasted’s and Bohm’s outsider status, personal ambition, and institutional location are
relevant to an understanding of their paranormal enthusiasms, but are insufficient in
themselves. To understand their interest in paraphysics, we need to take seriously their
ideas and philosophies of life.

137
Hawkes (1954: np).
138
For example, see Daily Mail (1937: 9) and Prince-White (1933: 7).
139
Hasted (1992: 17).
140
Hasted (1992: 175).
141
Hasted (1992: 178).
 Radical physics 47

Two factors are paramount: first, paraphysics challenged the dominant practice of
science and of scientific evidence; second, it opened up new possibilities for a radical,
dialectical solution to the crises of the modern world. These two explanations overlap,
but I will examine them in turn.
Paranormal scientists held beliefs about the status of science and scientific ­evidence
that were incompatible with those of mainstream physics. They emphasised the import­
ance of emotions, insisted on the effect of the observer on the observed, recognised
the co-production of knowledge, and extolled the power of the people or ordinary
‘folk’.
For Hasted and Bohm, emotions did and should play a pivotal role in physics
research. Hasted upbraided skeptics for accusing paranormal scientists of being
­‘emotionally committed to the phenomenon’. Surely they were forgetting their own
emotional desire ‘to finding … no phenomenon’, he asked?142 He urged everyone with
a sincere interest in the natural world to develop a ‘sense of wonder’.143 The awesome-
ness of unexplained phenomena should excite curiosity, which must be allowed free
rein. As Taylor rhetorically asked his readers in Nature (before his cynicism for
­paraphysics set in): ‘Do we necessarily have to doff the garb of scientist when satis­
fying our curiosity about such events?’ If this was required, then science would be
‘circumscribed in a very peculiar way’.144
Paraphysics also held to the fundamental tenet of relativity theory that the
‘observer’ changes the ‘observed’. Bernal’s The Social Function of Science (1939),
which had proven so influential in both Hasted’s and Bohm’s life-philosophy,145 pro-
posed wide themes about the social ‘construction’ of science: science itself—that is, the
way humans strive to make sense of and give meaning to the world—was implicated
in the creation of these worlds. This approach to science and evidence was influenced
by Marxist historical materialism. Scientific laws explain society and its progressive
historical movements, but the intervention of the political subject (that is, the prole-
tariat and its representatives in the Communist Party) accelerates the movement
towards socialism and eventually changes the laws of society. The political subject
observing the process is participating at the same time in its change.
Bohm, in particular, espoused a complex, constructivist philosophy in his concept
of ‘enfoldment’. For Bohm, everything in the universe was enfolded into everything
else. The ‘Birkbeck School’ of physics146 was a fundamental challenge to classical
physics. Firstly, quantum theory gives us ‘entanglement’ where two entangled p ­ articles

142
Margolis (1998: 212). Hasted makes this comment in Hasted (1981: 4).
143
Hasted (1992: 182).
144
Taylor (1975: 470).
145
Hasted (1992: 17).
146
Sharpe (1993: 23).
48 Joanna Bourke

appear to have a ‘direct interaction between them’ irrespective of their distance apart.
Bohm’s notion of the quantum potential, implicit in Schrödinger’s equation, directly
encapsulates ‘entanglement’ and puts quantum non-locality into sharp focus’.147
Secondly, Bohm’s quantum potential ‘has within it information on the physical situ­
ation over a wide region of space. In principle it encodes information on the whole
universe.’ This means that, ‘as the system changes’, so too the ‘relation between two
particulars in the system changes’.148 The crucial difference was that while classical
physics paid attention to the ‘microscopic world of the atom and smaller’, Bohm and
his collaborator Basil Hiley suggested that quantum laws applied equally to the
­macroscopic world.149
Bohm’s worldview, then, was fundamentally a critique of Cartesian dualism, in
which consciousness or thought was distinct from matter. Descartes had postulated
that God was the force that facilitated relationships between mind and matter. For
Bohm, however, there was no dichotomy between consciousness and the physical
world: the two could not be distinguished because they were enfolded into each other
in one single movement. In Bohm’s words, ‘we do not say that mind and body causally
affect each other, but rather that the movements of both are the outcome of related
projections of a common higher-dimensional ground’.150 Because of this fundamental
entanglement, it was wrong to speak in terms of ‘the’ or ‘it’. According to Bohm’s
quantum physics, the only correct way to speak was to avoid all nouns and to use only
verbs, connoting temporality, movement, processes over time. Bohm called this
­verb-based language ‘rheomode’, from the Greek ‘rheo-’ to flow. In his words,
the notion of a permanent object with well defined properties can no longer be taken
as basic in physics. … Rather, it is necessary to begin with the event as a basic concept,
and later to arrive at the object as a continuing structure of related and ordered
events.151

Physicist John S. Bell (who had been inspired by Bohm) formulated ‘Bell’s theorem’,
which claimed that ‘quantum objects that had once interacted would retain
some strange link or connection, even after they had moved arbitrarily far apart from
each other’. Both Bohm and Bell developed concepts such as ‘nonlocality’ and
­‘entanglement’.152 As David Kaiser explained,

147
Sharpe (1993: 24).
148
Sharpe (1993: 24).
149
Sharpe (1993: 24).
150
Quoting Bohm in Peters (2003: 108).
151
Bohm (1963: 6).
152
Kaiser (2011: xxiv).
 Radical physics 49

Bell’s theorem and quantum entanglement seemed to suggest that one could use
quantum theory to act at a distance, instantly. Nudge a particle here and its partner
would instantaneously dance over there, regardless of whether it was nanometers or
light-years away.153

This, combined with the thought that it might (contrary to Einstein) be possible to
travel faster than the speed of light, encouraged the question: ‘Was acting at a dis-
tance really so different from clairvoyance, psychokinesis, or the Eastern mystics’
emphasis on holism?’154
Another inference from such ideas was that the ‘mini-Gellers’ were not isolated,
docile, or disciplined bodies. They drew upon unconscious forces within their entire
environment in order to harness their psychic powers. There was nothing ‘super­
natural’ about the process. Rather, the ‘Geller kids’ seemed to be ‘drawing their strange
power from another dimension in a reservoir of energy that is all around us but
­inaccessible to all but a few’.155 In an attempt to simplify these arguments, Hasted,
Bohm, Bastin, and O’Regan drew analogies to the relationship between a partially
paralysed man and his physiotherapist. In order to
regain the use of his hand, he must somehow activate new nervous pathways. How he
is to do this, he does not know. All he can do, with all his energy, is to feel out the
possibilities of movement and to observe with great attention and alertness what
movements actually take place. He cannot describe or even think about just what it is
that he does in getting his hand to move. … The contact between brain and hand is
brought about almost entirely by unconscious functions of the mind, which tend to be
erratic and fortuitous.156

Crucially, too, in order for the hand to move, the physiotherapist also had to profess
faith in the patient’s capabilities. The ‘necessity of open-ness to the possibility of an
ultimate result must be maintained in the minds of all concerned’, they contended.157
This meant that knowledge was co-produced. Unlike most scientific experiments,
the distinction between ‘scientist’ and ‘subject’ was blurred, even eradicated altogether.
Paraphysicists pleaded with their fellow scientists to remember that the ­‘person who
produces these [psychic] phenomena is not an instrument or a machine’, and even less
is he or she an ‘ “object” to be observed with suspicion’. Indeed, ‘cold and impersonal’
interactions as well as ‘any attempt to treat him [sic] as such will almost ­certainly lead
to failure’.158 Hasted lashed out at people who criticised paraphysicists on the grounds

153
Kaiser (2011: xxiv).
154
Kaiser (2011: xxiv).
155
Owen (1978: np).
156
Hasted et al. (1975: 470–1).
157
Hasted et al. (1975: 471, emphasis added).
158
Hasted et al. (1975: 470–1).
50 Joanna Bourke

that such researchers ‘wanted the events to happen’. Of course, Hasted scolded, this
was ‘in some degree true, and it may be that this is why they did happen’.159 Hasted’s
argument was critical of the dominant scientific regime and its conception of truth,
particularly ‘objectivity’.
The breach of the ‘detached objectivity’ norm of scientific experimentation is
movingly depicted in a short film-clip of Hasted’s interactions with Stephen North. In
the film, the older scientist and the young Stephen are depicted sitting companionably
together in a laboratory in front of a vast array of complex recording devices. Hasted
is being interviewed, but, as he speaks, he repeatedly nods and gestures towards
Stephen, making reassuring grunts and friendly interjections, while seeking Stephen’s
consent and inviting his involvement. His fatherly demeanour is most evident when he
jests that sometimes ‘we’ can’t make the experiment work and have to break for a cup
of tea—whereupon, they both chuckle. Tea in hand (and, cynics might add, suitably
distracted), Stephen and Hasted succeed in harnessing Stephen’s paranormal energies.
What is clear in this film-clip is that the distinguished physicist is enjoying himself,
proudly acknowledging the interpersonal nature of science. He is also gesturing
towards the leftist commitment to collective work which, in theory, values all partici-
pants equally. It was an unorthodox model of science in which experimental praxis
and reasoning are fundamentally shared.
The final challenge to the status of science and scientific evidence was the
­paraphysicists’ unshakable belief in the ‘folk’—people like Julie from Trowbridge and
Stephen from Highgate. Power resided in the People. Literally. Any person capable of
tuning into Geller on television or simply being receptive to paranormal energies
could harness these abilities within themselves. Admittedly, Hasted did privilege
youth, maintaining that he ‘preferred to deal with child metal-benders’ because he
believed that they were ‘less likely to cheat than adults’, as well as being more accept-
ing and therefore receptive.160 Of course, this was yet another target for ridicule, with
opponents sneering about Hasted and Bohm’s experiments with ‘innocent young girls’
and ‘11-year-old innocents’.161 Nevertheless, Hasted repeatedly insisted that psychic
abilities had nothing to do with intelligence, social background, or gender (although
girls outnumbered boys in a ratio of three to two).162 All that was required was the will
to believe in their own power.
For both Hasted and Bohm, science had meaning; and that meaning was political.
For Hasted, in particular, all his passions—physics, communism, peace, and folk

159
Hasted (1981: 4, emphasis in the original).
160
Owen (1978: np).
161
Morrison (1976: 134).
162
Owen (1978: np). The ratio between girls and boys is from Holroyd (1977: 108).
 Radical physics 51

music—were about forging better worlds. As he expressed it in his Alternative Memoirs

(1992), his principle was
Sing me a song of significance,
No other song will do.163

The ‘armies of Kings and Emperors’ could be overthrown by ‘folk’ loudly singing The
Marseillaise and the Carmagnole;164 the Cold War could be halted if other ordinary
‘folk’ sang peace songs. Even the atom bomb (whether American or Soviet) could not
be detonated if a significant number of psychically sensitive people ‘concentrate[ed]
on the trigger mechanism’.165 The psychic energies of ordinary ‘folk’ could change the
world.

PART SEVEN: CAPITALISM, THE COLD WAR, AND STALINISM

The attraction of paraphysics was not only in the way it challenged the dominant
paradigm of science; it also opened up new possibilities for radical, dialectical
responses to three crises: capitalism, the Cold War, and Stalinism.
Capitalism’s failure was self-evident to these paraphysicists. Hasted had turned to
leftist politics as a consequence of witnessing the hunger marches of the 1930s and
reflecting on the ineffective remedies (‘Buy British!’) proposed by Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin.166 During his time at Oxford, he began
to understand just how isolated from the real world scientific research had become.
This was surely a political problem. Scientists did not seem to have any contact with
the social and economic problems of the world. … They just persevered with own
academic tasks, having apparently despaired of the rest of mankind, particularly the
politicians, ever taking them seriously. This syndrome had become known as ‘the
­frustration of science’.167

Both he and Bohm had also been profoundly shocked by the financial crash of
1973–74. Radical solutions seemed to be both necessary and possible.
The second crisis was the Cold War. Nuclear war was a real possibility, which
Hasted addressed directly in a book he wrote with physicist E. H. S. Burhop, entitled

163
Hasted (1992: 1).
164
Hasted (1992: 37).
165
This was a statement on a Discovery Channel programme, uploaded onto YouTube under the title
‘Psychokinetic Metal Bending’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPrJ1pSP2UI (viewed 15 May
2018).
166
Hasted (1992: 17).
167
Hasted (1992: 17).
52 Joanna Bourke

The Challenge of Atomic Energy (1951).168 In it, they argued that Britain would become
a ‘smoking, radioactive ruin’ if there was a nuclear war.169 Much of Hasted’s early life
was devoted to anti-war activism.170 As a musician, he used to perform ‘Talking
Atomic Blues’.171 He led the singing on CND marches.172 His second wife was Lynn
Wynn-Harris,173 the secret ‘Voice of Nuclear Disarmament’ radio station, which
broadcasted on BBC and ITV channels after they signed off at midnight.174 The fact
that the Western powers (particularly the United States) were engaged in psychic
research worried him. In 1975, he explained that ‘one reason for our staying in the
parafield is in order that it does not become a military monopoly’.175
The third crisis was Stalinism. Bohm’s leftwing beliefs were rapidly subsumed by
Eastern mysticism, but a substantial part of Hasted’s life was spent in the Communist
Party. In 1949, he had been elected ‘Commandant’ of the Third Brigade, consisting of
around 100 young British leftists who volunteered to help build a road from Belgrade
to Zagreb.176 Thanks to his prodigious energy and charisma, his unit was dubbed the
‘Shock Brigade’.177 He had been Secretary of the Oxford University Communist Party
and while at Birkbeck was active (along with Bernal, Hobsbawm, and Browning) in
the London University branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). At
the same time that fellow nuclear physicist Eric Burhop was being hounded for his
communist and internationalist beliefs, Hasted and his wife Elizabeth were energetic
members of the Notting Hill branch of the CPGB, selling copies of the Daily Worker
door-to-door and writing slogans on walls, a crime that could have committed them
to prison for three months (their favourite was ‘OUT WITH THE TORIES’).178 It
was Hasted who used his physics training to reveal that the CPGB headquarters in
King Street was being bugged by the security services.179 Later in life, he admitted to
having been pro-Stalin. He had boasted about ‘our adored Uncle Joe’. He had loudly
sung ‘Joe Stalin was a Mighty Man’180 and

168
Hasted (1992: 111).
169
Burhop with Hasted (1951).
170
Bonnett (1961: 13). He noted that neither of them were actually members of the Committee of 100.
171
Hasted (1992: 111).
172
Hasted (1992: 155–7).
173
He married her in 1958.
174
Bonnett (1961: 13).
175
Hasted (1975: 4).
176
Hasted (1992: 103).
177
Hasted (1992: 106).
178
Hasted (1992: 96–7).
179
Hasted (1992: 102).
180
Sims (2000: 2).
 Radical physics 53

Your Uncle Joe’s a worker

And a very decent chap.
Because he smokes a pipe
And wears a taxi-driver’s cap.181

Like many British communists, he discounted rumours of oppression and murder

‘right up to the time when Kruschev [sic] lifted the lid off the whole can of worms’.182
The ‘shock of the revelations’ was recalled with poignancy at the end of his life.183
The exposure of Stalin’s purges shattered the communist hopes of party members
like Hasted. This did not mean, though, that they had to forsake all hope in the power
of the ‘folk’, the physical-force of ‘spectars’ (Latin for ‘that which is not seen’), and
the inexorable march of history (although given their repudiation of time-as-forward-
movement, they would have preferred ‘the irresistible laws of a new physics’). In the
opening lines of The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels contended that
‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old
Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.’ For Hasted and
many of his comrades, the spectre of communism had been tarnished by Stalinism,
but they had an idea of another spectre—one that was equally invisible but had
incredible power. Paraphysics provided a way to think about an invisible, invincible
spectre that haunted both the past-in-the-present and the future-in-the-past.
The impact of these three crises should not lead us to assume that paraphysics was
simply ‘something to believe in’.184 That is far too simplistic. Hasted and Bohm did
not simply repudiate capitalism, the Cold War, and Stalinism. They embraced a praxis
that took economics, war, and Marxism/Hegelianism to a new level. These three crises
encouraged them to embrace paraphysics as a form of radical, dialectical, and s­ cientific
utopianism. Marxism (for Hasted) and Hegelianism (for Bohm) provided them with
the assurance that they would be at the vanguard of a revolution in physics; it also
provided them with an ideological ‘frame of meaning’ which demystified science as
bourgeois.
However—and crucially—Hasted and Bohm went far beyond dialectical or
­historical materialism, as well as other processural ways of thinking (such as the belief
in progress or evolutionary mechanics). For them, process itself was the wrong way to
frame the world because it was based on a notion of time-as-linear, forward movement
and place-as-location. Instead, their revolutionary, new interpretation of quantum
mechanics taught them that the historical present was effectively to be transcended,

181
Hasted (1992: 103).
182
Hasted (1992: 103).
183
Hasted (1992: 80).
184
This was a common interpretation. For example, see Morrison (1976: 134).
54 Joanna Bourke

folded into the future. The future was also always folding into the past. What this
meant was that the future could be reclaimed (for the Marxist); it could also be fore-
stalled through the unconscious energies of ordinary people. The ‘folk’ could literally
stop the Cold War from heating up. There was no need to counter bourgeois e­ conomics
or the liberal marketplace, because power resided with the people (literally). As Hasted
insisted time and again, the ‘social consequences of such an understanding [of ­physics]
could be very great’.185
As should now be obvious, utopian paraphysics was concerned with much more
than identifying and explaining a set of scientifically inexplicable phenomena: it was
centrally about political change. Although Hasted believed that ‘a practical applica-
tion is a long way off’, he was equally confident that ‘one day these kind of powers
could be used for healing’.186 Hasted did admit to feeling anxious about whether there
might be ‘social dangers’ associated with possessing extraordinary abilities such as
metal-bending. Although he could find no ‘experimental evidence’, he did speculate
that there might be a ‘built-in safety-catch on psychokinetic phenomena, ensuring
that we cannot bring about anything which will harm ourselves or our friends’.187
Admittedly, there was room for ‘playful misdemeanours’ (for example, one of his
‘mini-Gellers’ bent his grandmother’s knitting-needles ‘when she was at a critical stage
of purl and plain’), but it was rare for his subjects to suffer even a ‘skin abrasion by
metal-bending’.188

PART EIGHT: CONCLUSION

Paraphysics appealed to physicists like Hasted and (for a shorter period) Bohm
because it provided a way to develop the idea of a radical break with time and space—
that is, the realisation of a new form of human subjectivity that was cooperative,
shared, and universal. Theirs was a philosophy that literally transcended geopolitical
space, opening up the possibility for unity across the globe. True solidarity with other
peoples, whose space and locality was far away and unknown, was a possibility after
all. Knowledge of physics could be mobilised for political ends; science itself was
political praxis.
Neither scientist was afraid of radical disruption, exceptionality, unexplainability,
or spectacle. They defied orthodox physics, challenging theories of time (linearity),

185
Hasted (1981: 1).
186
Robins (1979: np).
187
Hasted (1981: 249).
188
Hasted (1981: 249).
 Radical physics 55

space (effects are weaker at a distance), and energy. They showed little interest in what
Slavoj Žižek called a ‘performative reconfiguration’ of their discipline. They were sub-
versive, but in a way that stepped outside the ‘hegemonic field’ of mainstream physics.
They sought nothing less than a ‘thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which
redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity’, such as conventional
ideas of time and space, observed and observer.189
Paraphysics has become nothing more than a footnote in the history of physics. It
is usually mentioned as a warning to other intrepid souls or as a way of introducing a
little humour to an otherwise wholly earnest science. But this should not blind us to
its perceived radical potential.
Hasted remained a believer to his dying day. In his old age, speaking from his
­bungalow in St Ives, Cornwall (a home, incidentally, that overlooked Virginia Woolf’s
lighthouse), he mused poignantly about his collaborations with ‘his’ mini-Gellers. ‘Are
we supposed [to believe] that it was just a one-off ?’, he asked. He admitted that his
paraphysics experiments
may not be a significant part of knowledge, but that is not to say it didn’t happen.
I stand by what I reported, although I don’t know whether it will ever happen again or
not. What is left of those metalbending days is a collection of specimens, chart-­records
and literature reports; things of the past.

As Hasted repeated: ‘nothing beside remains. … I could not even weep. I was reminded
of my bent spoons. Did it all really happen?’190 He concluded his book on The Mind-
benders with the verse:
Now, reader, that our tale is told,
Canst thou the riddle guess?
Such things in simpler days of old
Were heard with faithfulness.
But we, it seems, are wiser grown
Less willing to believe.
And till we see the causes shown
Can scarce effects believe.
But if these pages serve to show
A truth, their moral brings
How much imperfectly we know
Even in trivial things;

189
Žižek (1999: 264).
190
Hasted (1992: 182).
56 Joanna Bourke

If you our sense of wonder call

From where it’s idle lain,
Why, then, good METALBENDERS all,
You’ll not have bent in vain.191

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Professor David Latchman (Master of Birkbeck,

University of London), Professor Costas Douzinas (Professor of Law at Birkbeck
and Syriza MP), and The Wellcome Trust.

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Note on the author: Joanna Bourke is Professor of History in the Department of

History, Classics, and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. She is writing
the history of Birkbeck for the bicentenary in 2023. She is the Principal Investigator
in a five-year Wellcome Trust project on ‘Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry’.
She is the author of 13 books, including What It Means to Be Human: Reflections
from 1791 to the Present (Virago, 2011), The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers
 Radical physics 59

(Oxford University Press, 2014), and Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
(Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007).
[email protected].

To cite the article: Joanna Bourke (2019), ‘Radical physics: science, socialism, and the
paranormal at Birkbeck College in the 1970s’, Journal of the British Academy, 7: 25–59.
DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/007.025

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