AUTOBIOGRAPHY (G.K. CHESTERTON), ELEMENTARY PARTICLES, PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT AND SPIRITUALISM

From my point of view this text is not so much about scientists in the old times being less accurate as about the fact that the things they studied were as mysterious as ectoplasms. It´s also remarkable that physicists dealt with spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th century when Physics was such an amazing field, from the point of view of a late-20th-century student.

When I was quite a boy, practically no normal person of education thought that a ghost could possibly be anything but a turnip-ghost; a thing believed in by nobody but the village idiot. When I was a young man, practically every person with a large circle had one or two friends with a fancy for what would still have been called mediums and moonshine. When I was middle-aged, great men of science of the first rank like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge claimed to have studied spirits as they might have studied spiders, and discovered ectoplasm exactly as they discovered protoplasm. At the time I write, the thing has grown into a considerable religious movement, by the activity of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, much less of a scientist, but much more of a journalist.