Think of a scientist and, if you’re not picturing a wild-eyed and eccentric figure such as Doc from Back To The Future, there’s a good chance you’re picturing a white-coated, rational, diligent man or woman doing Important Work. This, after all, is the image the scientific community likes to project. But, as Hannu Rajaniemi points out, there have been plenty of famous scientists who have had rather more esoteric ideas, especially in the 19th century.
“You have serious people like Lord Kelvin and [James Clerk] Maxwell and Peter Tait, the Scottish mathematician, speculating about how could the afterlife work,” he says. “Could we actually use some of these new discoveries, x-rays or radio or things like that, to understand how it works?” Further out in leftfield, American Spiritualist preacher John…
