Sir Joseph John Thomson (1856–1940) – "J. J." to the entire generation of physicists after him – was one of the architects of modern atomic physics: Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge from 1884 to 1919 (successor to Lord Rayleigh, predecessor of Ernest Rutherford), discoverer of the electron in 1897, Nobel Prize in Physics 1906, knighted in 1908, Order of Merit 1912, President of the Royal Society 1915–1920, Master of Trinity College Cambridge from 1918 until his death in 1940. What is almost always missing from the popular image of science: Thomson was for decades a member of the Society for Psychical Research, was personally present at the 1895 Cambridge sittings with Eusapia Palladino, and took the subject up explicitly in his 1936 autobiography.
Who was J. J. Thomson?
Thomson was born in 1856 in Cheetham Hill near Manchester, the son of a bookseller. He went early to Owens College Manchester (today the University of Manchester), then on a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge. In 1884, aged just 28, he was appointed the third Cavendish Professor of Physics – as successor to Lord Rayleigh. The choice was a surprise; Thomson was at that time one of the youngest holders of the chair, with a more theoretical than experimental background.
Despite this start, he developed the Cavendish Laboratory into the world's most important experimental physics institute. Seven of his students later received the Nobel Prize – among them Ernest Rutherford, Charles Glover Barkla, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson, William Lawrence Bragg, Francis Aston and Edward Victor Appleton. Thomson's own son, George Paget Thomson, also received the Nobel Prize in 1937 (for the experimental demonstration of the wave nature of the electron). Father and son on the same list, once for the particle and once for the wave nature of the same entity – a very English detail.
The discovery of the electron (1897)
Thomson's main work is the identification of cathode rays as negatively charged particles with a mass far below that of the hydrogen atom. The experimental setup built on the Crookes tubes (see our piece on William Crookes). Thomson showed that the deflection of the rays by electric and magnetic fields yields a constant charge-to-mass ratio – independently of the cathode material used. From this followed the existence of an elementary constituent of matter common to all atoms: the electron. The publication appeared in October 1897 in the Philosophical Magazine. The Nobel Prize followed in 1906.
In other words: as with Crookes, the Curies, Lodge and Rayleigh – a first-rank physicist whose scientific authority was entirely uncontested at the moment he came near psi research.
Joining the SPR
Thomson joined the Society for Psychical Research in the 1890s – not as a founding member like Sidgwick or Myers, but early and for decades actively. As with Rayleigh and Lodge, the SPR in Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge was not a fringe association but part of the established Trinity College world. Thomson sat on the SPR Council and took part in discussions, but unlike Crookes or Lodge he did not publish his own works on the subject – his position was from the start that of a careful participant, not an active researcher.
The Cambridge Palladino sittings, 1895
In August and September 1895, Henry Sidgwick and Frederic Myers brought the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino to Cambridge, to Myers's house in Selwyn Gardens. Thomson was personally present at several of these sittings, alongside Oliver Lodge, Richard Hodgson, Walter Leaf and other SPR figures.
What Thomson observed there he later described briefly in his autobiography: some of the reported phenomena he could not explain – but Hodgson's findings, that Palladino had demonstrably cheated under loose control, left a lasting impression. For the SPR the Cambridge sittings of 1895 were a turning point – the official distancing from Palladino followed immediately. For Thomson personally they confirmed a basic conviction: in cases of physical mediumship, caution is paramount.
Thomson's position: cautious openness
Unlike Crookes or Lodge, Thomson never publicly committed himself to a survival hypothesis. But neither did he claim that the field was methodologically closed. His position can perhaps best be described as follows:
- Telepathy: serious enough to be investigated. Thomson considered the statistical evidence from the Gurney-Myers-Podmore studies not trivially explained away.
- Physical mediumship (table levitation, materialisation): strongly sceptical after the Palladino experience. Too many possibilities for deception, too few clean replications.
- Survival of consciousness after death: as a scientific question open, but not decidable on mediumistic evidence alone.
This distinction is typical of the SPR milieu – Rayleigh and the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick shared it largely. It is methodologically a good filter: not "all or nothing", but which class of phenomena with which standard of proof.
"Recollections and Reflections" (1936)
In 1936, four years before his death, Thomson published his autobiography Recollections and Reflections with Macmillan. It is primarily a scientist's memoir: Cambridge, the Cavendish Laboratory, his students, his time as RS President and Master of Trinity. But the book also contains a separate chapter on his psi experiences – short, carefully phrased, but not dismissive. Thomson reconstructs the Palladino sittings, describes individual unexplained observations and concludes that after decades of serious engagement the question of telepathy is for him more open than at the start, the question of physical materialisation by contrast practically decided – in the negative sense.
It is remarkable that an 80-year-old Nobel-laureate physicist and Master of Trinity gives the subject its own chapter in his last major book at all. Anyone who considered it "nonsense" would leave it out. Thomson did not.
"After long engagement I consider it quite possible that there is a form of thought-transmission which our current physics does not explain. With the more dramatic phenomena – levitations, materialisations – I have not been able to reach any such conviction."
— Paraphrase of Thomson's concluding position in the chapter on psychical research, Recollections and Reflections (1936)
Comparison with Lodge and Rayleigh
Three Cavendish-related physicists, three positions on the same question:
- Lodge (1851–1940): after 1915 publicly convinced of the survival hypothesis, writes Raymond and three further books on the subject.
- Rayleigh (1842–1919): a cautious "third position" – telepathy serious, survival open, everything under methodological strictness.
- Thomson (1856–1940): cautious openness for telepathy, clear scepticism on physical mediumship, no public survival statement.
What is remarkable is the agreement in essentials: all three did not dismiss the field. They differentiated it. Precisely this differentiation – the separation between the various classes of psi-relevant phenomena – is missing from the popular "mainstream against esoterica" picture of 20th-century science.
What remains
- Maximum scientific authority. Discoverer of the electron, Nobel Prize 1906, RS President, Master of Trinity. If such a person remains an SPR member for decades and devotes a chapter of his autobiography to the subject, that is a datum that belongs in the history of science.
- Present at Cambridge in 1895. Thomson was one of the direct eyewitnesses of the Palladino sittings that became a methodological key event for the SPR and English psi research.
- Class separation as method. Not "all or nothing", but "which phenomenon with which standard of proof". This methodology established itself in the later experimental research from Rhine to Beischel.
- Quiet steadfastness. Thomson never exposed himself publicly for psi research the way Lodge or Crookes did. But neither did he abandon it. This form of quiet participation is possibly more influential within the scientific establishment than the loud confession.
Thomson belongs in the historical line we are tracing on this site: Kepler, Crookes, the Curies, Lodge, Rayleigh, Jung, Pauli, Einstein, Rhine, PEAR. Among them he is the most restrained – and precisely because of that, the one whose long-standing SPR membership alone is an independent historical argument.
Sources
- J. J. Thomson: Recollections and Reflections. Macmillan, London 1936 – autobiography, with a chapter on his experiences in psi research.
- J. J. Thomson: Cathode Rays. Philosophical Magazine, Vol. 44, October 1897 – the electron discovery.
- Lord Rayleigh (4th Baron, Robert John Strutt): The Life of Sir J. J. Thomson, O. M.. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1942 – standard biography.
- Edward A. Davis & Isabel J. Falconer: J. J. Thomson and the Discovery of the Electron. Taylor & Francis, London 1997.
- Dong-Won Kim: Leadership and Creativity. A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871–1919. Kluwer, Dordrecht 2002.
- Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research – reports on the Palladino Cambridge sittings 1895 (Vol. 11/12), online via spr.ac.uk.