A mathematical physicist at King’s College, London, and an ardent believer in Uri Geller’s psychic abilities, particularly his metal bending by mental power. Taylor went further and believed that many children shared this power. So convinced was he that he appeared on television in Britain in support of Geller and this psychic phenomenon, and wrote books and articles on the subject. In Superminds (1975), he discusses possible, but highly improbable, physical explanations, eventually deciding that the process must be electromagnetic. In his book Black Holes (1973), Taylor engages in flights of fancy about spaceships, extraterrestrials, multiple universes, and immortality. Taylor became an advocate of his fellow London physicist John B. Hasted’s experiments on paranormal metal bending. But eventually he became disenchanted, concluding that the demonstrated effects were either fraudulent or inadequately controlled, publishing his account of his disillusionment in Science and the Supernatural (1979).
Although Taylor had been convinced that the various paranormal phenomena could be genuine, he was confident that, if so, there had to be some physical process by which they were effected that they were not, in the strict sense of the word, magical. He considered the many possible force fields or particles of physics, both known and hypothesized, that might be involved: gravity, quarks, the weak force, bosons, neutrinos, magnetic monopoles, tachyons, and so on. He concluded that the only possible way that these effects could be explained was through electromagnetic fields and eventually decided that it could not be done; electromagnetic fields could not be involved. By that time, he had been shown that many of the effects that he had thought genuine were achieved by cheating or trickery. He, with one of his colleagues, published papers in Nature in 1978 and 1979. In the former, they explained that their attempts to validate and to detect an electromagnetic link in what they termed “extrasensory phenomena” had failed.