John G. Taylor

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John Gerald Taylor (1931–2012) was a British physicist, parapsychologist and author. He originally endorsed paranormal phenomena, but after his own experiments and serious investigation, he became skeptical of the subject.

Parapsychology

Taylor, after witnessing metal bending by Uri Geller, became interested in parapsychology. At first he believed that Uri Geller's feats were genuine, along with other reported paranormal phenomena. He wrote a book titled Superminds: An Enquiry into the Paranormal (1975) in which he argued for a physical explanation for the paranormal. He believed the explanation for metal bending, psychokinesis, ESP and other paranormal phenomena may be found in electromagnetism.

He was concerned to establish whether there is an electromagnetic basis for the phenomena, however after failing to find it, he did not believe that there could be any other physical explanation. Many of his experiments under laboratory conditions were negative, which left him skeptical regarding the validity of the reported phenomena. Taylor later became a skeptic of the paranormal; in his book Science and the Supernatural (1980) he declared that all reports of ESP and psychokinesis were either frauds or hallucinations, as he came to the conclusion that the paranormal can not be reconciled with modern physics.

Published works

Books

• The Mind: A User's Manual, (2006), ISBN 0-470-02222-1.
• Neural Networks and the Financial Markets Predicting, Combining, and Portfolio Optimisation (2002), ISBN 1-85233-531-9
• The Race for Consciousness (1999), ISBN 0-262-20115-1.
• The Promise of Neural Networks (Perspectives in Neural Computing), (1993), ISBN 3-540-19773-7.
• Science and the Supernatural: An Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena Including Psychic Healing, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, and Precognition by a Distinguished Physicist and Mathematician (1980), ISBN 0-85117-191-5
• Superminds: An Enquiry into the Paranormal (1975), ISBN 0-333-17701-0
• New Worlds in Physics (1974), ISBN 0-571-10258-1
• Black Holes: The End of the Universe? (1973), ISBN 0-380-00327-9
• The New Physics (1972), ISBN 0-465-05066-2
• The Shape of Minds to Come (1971), ISBN 0-7181-0788-8

Papers

• Taylor, J. G. & Balanovski, E. (1978). Can electromagnetism account for extra-sensory phenomena? Nature 276, 64-67.
• Taylor, J. G. & Balanovski, E. (1979). Is there any scientific explanation of the paranormal? Nature 279, 631-633.