Making Space for the Soul

Author:

Noakes Richard

Abstract

This chapter examines the origins, development and reception of Oliver Lodge’s ‘psychic’ uses of the ether of space. It explores the connections that he made between his Maxwellian conceptions of the ether, and psychical research into the soul. It argues that his ideas of a psychic ether owed much to Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait’s Unseen Universe (1875) and to a growing friendship with the major figure in Victorian psychical research, F. W. H. Myers. Lodge’s attachment to the ether, and its possible psychic functions, only grew stronger after 1900 when the necessity for a quasi-mechanical medium was challenged by relativity theory, and the need for the soul to have a more substantial state was fuelled by the mass slaughter in World War I. The chapter concludes by arguing that Lodge’s conceptions of the ether enjoyed much greater popularity among wireless engineers and spiritualists than among fellow physicists.

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Cited by 3 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. What’s in a name?;The European Physical Journal H;2023-05-07

2. Killed by its own obituaries: Explaining the demise of the ether;Science in Context;2021-06

3. Do scientific objects have a life (which may end)?;Science in Context;2021-06

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