Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism

Feminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate.

Transformations of Knowledge in Oliver Lodge’s Ether and Reality

This chapter examines Oliver Lodge’s popular science book Ether and Reality, which was published in 1925. In it, Oliver Lodge purported to give a non-technical account of the functions of the luminiferous ether. However, Lodge himself had a dilemma, as he wanted the ether to be different from material bodies but not wholly immaterial. Lodge thus needed to present both an account of the ether and an account of a scientific view that was sympathetic to its possible existence. This chapter examines Lodge’s expository strategies in his book. It considers Lodge’s creation of ethos, and the reader that his text implies, paying particular attention to his use of analogy, repetition, parallelism and allusion. It also identifies previously unremarked literary allusions and allusions to the Bible. Finally, as this chapter shows, much of Lodge’s work is done through suggestion and insinuation: Lodge requires the reader to complete his meaning for him.

The Ether at the Crossroads of Classical and Modern Physics

This chapter aims to liberate the ether from its historiographical assignment to classical physics, instead considering its role in debates surrounding the future of the discipline. Focusing on the British case, it explores the discussions underway in professional spaces between 1909 and 1914, suggesting that a physicist’s commitment to the ether does not classify them as a ‘classicist’ but rather as an advocate of continuity in the discipline. It then examines the ether’s ‘popular’ life following the well-publicised 1919 eclipse expedition, and the subsequent expository efforts by the ‘classical’ Oliver Lodge and ‘modern’ Arthur Stanley Eddington. By moving beyond a traditional approach that divides physics and physicists into classical and modern, this chapter suggests a more substantial role for the ether in professional and popular early twentieth-century British physics.

Ether and Modernity

This book is a snapshot of the ether qua epistemic object in the early twentieth century. It shows that the ether was not necessarily regarded as the residue of old-fashioned science, but often as one of the objects of modernity, hand in hand with the electron, radioactivity or X-rays. Instrumental in this was the emergence of wireless technologies and radio broadcasting, which brought the ether into social audiences who would otherwise have never heard about it. Following the prestige of scientists like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Eddington as popularisers of science, the ether became common currency among the general educated public. Modernism in the arts was also fond of the ether in the early twentieth century: the values of modernism found in the complexities and contradictions of modern physics provided a fertile ground for the development of new artistic languages, in literature as much as in the pictorial and performing arts. The question of what was meant by ‘ether’ (or ‘aether’) in the early twentieth century at the scientific and cultural levels is also central to this book. The chapters in this book display a complex array of meanings that will help elucidate the uses of the ether before its purported abandonment. Rather than considering ether as simply a term that remained popular in several groups, this book shows the complexities of an epistemic object that saw, in the early twentieth century, the last episode in the long tradition of stretching its meaning and uses.

Umberto Boccioni’s Elasticity, Italian Futurism and the Ether of Space

This chapter focuses on Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 painting Elasticity and his response to the ether in both its scientific and its occult contexts. The absence of translations of Boccioni’s 1914 book Pittura scultura futuriste, combined with the general lack of knowledge of early twentieth-century ether physics, has obscured this central theme of Boccioni’s art and theory. Boccioni’s treatise is, in fact, filled with references to contemporary science, including X-rays, Hertzian waves, electrons and ‘the electric theory of matter’. The latter reference suggests his specific awareness of Oliver Lodge, whose ideas and writings were well known in Italy—in both popular scientific and occult sources. Indeed, for futurists such as Boccioni, as for so many others in the early twentieth century, occultism (including spiritualism) and science seemed to be equally valid routes for exploring the unknown. Lodge’s writings about an elastic, energy-filled, matter-producing ether surely provided the stimulus for Boccioni’s Elasticity.

P09 - O experimento demonstrativo de Oliver Lodge no ensino do eletromagnetismo no ensino médio

RESUMO - PÔSTER

Conservative attitudes to old-established organs: Oliver Lodge and Philosophical Magazine

In 1921 Oliver Lodge defended Philosophical Magazine against charges of mismanagement from the National Union of Scientific Workers. They alleged that its editors performed little editorial work, the bulk being done by the publishers, Taylor & Francis. Lodge reassured Nature's readers that the journal did consult its editors, and suggested ‘a conservative attitude towards old-established organs is wise; and that it is possible to over-organise things into lifelessness.’ The paper explores Lodge's response by considering the editorial arrangements at Philosophical Magazine . Founded in 1798, it remained remarkably unchanged and so appeared old-fashioned when compared with its closest rivals, Proceedings of the Royal Society and Proceedings of the Physical Society . We argue that for Lodge the management of Philosophical Magazine gave it the flexibility and independence required to sustain the kind of physics, also open to accusations of obsolescence, in which he believed.

‘Our Friend of Brilliant Ideas’: G. F. Fitzgerald and the Maxwellian Circle

From the late 1870s until his death in 1901, the Irish physicist G. F. Fitzgerald was one of the most active and influential proponents of Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field. Along with Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside, Heinrich Hertz, and other ‘Maxwellians’, Fitzgerald took the lead in extending Maxwell's theory, clarifying its expression, and subjecting it to experimental test. The surviving correspondence of this Maxwellian circle provides a window into the workings of late Victorian physics and into the private side of scientific communication.