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William Crookes

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At the time of his death Crookes was called the greatest of British scientists in the realm of exact knowledge. Knighted in 1897, he also received the Order of Merit in 1910; the Royal Society elected him president from 1913-15. Ubi Crookes ibi lux!
--
Orrin Elmer Dunlap, in Radio's 100 Men of Science : Biographical Narratives of Pathfinders in Electronics and Television (1944), p. 70

 
William Crookes

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Crookes received the high British distinction of the Order of Merit in 1910, and in 1913 he was elected President of the Royal Society. Crookes was esteemed not only in scientific circles but by the general public, and the tag Ubi Crookes, ibi lux reflected popular feeling.

 
William Crookes
 

When Crookes moved on into the crowd, a professor of physics told an anecdote of the last meeting: when a motto on the wall of one room, reading Ubi Crookes, Ibi Lux, had been altered to Ubi Crookes, Ibi Spooks. Wonder was expressed that a man of Crookes's attainments should believe in ghosts. "I'm not so sure," Conan Doyle said unexpectedly, "there is nothing in Crookes's belief."

 
William Crookes
 

Sir William Crookes was a great experimenter. His material discoveries are of lasting and fundamental value, though his theoretical speculations have not stood the test of time so well. While it is true that all scientific theories serve primarily only for the suggestion of further research, it must be admitted that Crookes's analytical power hardly equalled his gift as an investigator of new facts. His excursions into psychical research have been strongly criticized, and they certainly led him into some very curious situations, but they show that he thought all phenomena worthy of investigation, and refused to be bound by tradition and convention. He was a man of science in the broadest sense, an influential personality, and a doyen of his profession.

 
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This is exactly the kind of thing Templeton is ceaselessly angling for – recognition among real scientists – and they use their money shamelessly to satisfy their doomed craving for scientific respectability. They tried it on with the Royal Society of London, and they seem to have found a compliant Quisling in the current President, Martin Rees, who, though not religious himself, is a fervent 'believer in belief'.

 
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I for one don't even believe that he's president. In order to have a president you need to have an election, in order to have an election you have to have a choice, and if you remember back to the primaries there were people running against the war, Kennedy and McCarthy. They often got 85 to 90% of the votes, but when it came time for the parties, that was totally ignored, so in point of fact, there really was no election. For a man who's always wanted to be president, and now that he's president, he's not even president.

 
Phil Ochs
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