Ectoplasm

Remembering the Medium Helen Duncan

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Helen Duncan, an ordinary Scottish housewife, is reputed to have been one of the greatest materialization mediums that ever lived. She didn’t just speak to the dead: she welcomed them back to the séance room, wreathed in ectoplasm that emanated from her body. In this talk, Malcolm Gaskill looks back on Mrs Duncan’s legacy, particularly his experience of researching her life over a decade ago. Despite her conviction for fraud in 1944, this medium, like her spiritual guests, remains a vivid presence in the annals of Spiritualism and in Gaskill’s historical consciousness.


Malcolm Gaskill is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. An expert in the history of witchcraft and seventeenth-century mentalities, he is the author of many essays and articles, and of four books, mostly recently Witchcraft: a Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010). In 2001 he published Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (4th Estate), a biography of Helen Duncan.

Holocaust Denial

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This talk deals with a strange, politically motivated phenomenon that claims to be sceptical but in fact is engaged in the manufacture of new myths and conspiracy theories: Holocaust Denial.

Richard J Evans teaches History at Cambridge University and is the author of many books, including "Telling Lies About Hitler".

The Psychology of Anomalous Experiences

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Ever since records began, in every known society, a substantial proportion of the population has reported unusual experiences many of which we would today label as 'paranormal'. Opinion polls show that the majority of the general public accepts that paranormal phenomena do occur. Such widespread experience of and belief in the paranormal can only mean one of two things. Either the paranormal is real, in which case this should be accepted by the wider scientific community which currently rejects such claims. Or else belief in and experience of ostensibly paranormal phenomena can be fully explained in terms of psychological factors. This presentation will provide an introduction to the sub-discipline of anomalistic psychology, which may be defined as the study of extraordinary phenomena of behaviour and experience, in an attempt to provide non-paranormal explanations in terms of known psychological and physical factors. This approach will be illustrated with examples relating to a range of ostensibly paranormal phenomena.

Professor Chris French is the Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has published over 100 articles and chapters covering a wide range of topics within psychology. His main current area of research is the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He frequently appears on radio and television casting a sceptical eye over paranormal claims. He is the editor of The Skeptic and writes a regular column for the Guardian's online science pages.

 

The Real X-Files

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The Ministry of Defence is in the process of declassifying and releasing its entire archive of UFO files.  These go back decades and are packed with thousands of fascinating cases, including UFOs seen by police officers and pilots, and UFOs being tracked on radar.  Some files involve the secretive Defence Intelligence Staff and contain documents that were classified Secret UK Eyes Only.  Nick Pope will explain the history of the British government's involvement with this fascinating subject, setting out the policy on the issue, detailing how investigations are undertaken and revealing what conclusions were reached.  He will also update attendees on the programme to release the MoD's archive of UFO-related documents and will discuss some of the most extraordinary cases from these real-life X-Files.

Nick Pope used to work at the Ministry of Defence, where from 1991 to 1994 he was posted to a division where his duties included investigating UFOs. Initially sceptical, his official research and investigation convinced him that the UFO phenomenon raised important defence, national security and flight safety issues. He was particularly interested in cases where the witnesses were pilots or where UFOs were tracked on radar. Nick is now recognised as a leading authority on UFOs and the unexplained.

ATLAS and The Large Hadron Collider

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Andy Parker is a Professor of High Energy Physics at Cambridge University,
with over 160 publications on aspects of particle physics. His current
research interests involve experiments to reveal new physics in the
Tera-electron-volt energy regime. He is a founder of the ATLAS experiment
for the Large Hadron Collider, and for 6 years he was the project leader for
the ATLAS Inner Detector, the most complex detector system so far created at
CERN. He is also involved in large-scale distributed computing grids, used
for various scientific projects. He was awarded the Pilkington Prize for
excellence in teaching in 1997.

The talk will discuss the latest status and results from the ATLAS
experiment at the LHC. Data-taking started in November 2009, and is planned
to continue for at least 15 years. Early results will focus on measurements
of known processes at the TeV energy scale, such as quark-antiquark
production, and studies of the weak interaction. A major goal will be to
discover, or rule out, the Higgs boson, a key component of the "Standard
Model" of particle interactions. The talk will also discuss the more exotic
physics being investigated, such as extra space dimensions, quantum-sized
black holes, and supersymmetry.