Hasted, Professor John

Category: Scientist

 

Professor John Barrett Hasted (February 17, 1921 – May 4, 2002) was a British atomic physicist and folk musician.

He was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk in 1921 in a house next door to where Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of "The Rubaiyat" once lived.   Described as a “brilliant student”, he won a scholarship to Oxford and later in life became head of the physics department at Birbeck College, London, a post he held until his retirement in 1984.  Professor Hasted was the author of Physics Of Atomic Collisions (1964), Aqueous Dielectrics (1973), and his autobiography, Alternative Memoirs (1992).

What is of interest to this site, however, is his rejection of the direction theoretical physics took in the ‘60s and beyond, his search to find alternative answers in the thousands upon thousands of observations and experiments rejected by the more materialistic theoretical physicists of his day, and his very thorough and extremely carefully planned research into a host of so called paranormal phenomenon.  His book The Metal Benders (1981), documents his work and results and we have used extracts to detail his findings. 

 

From THE METAL-BENDERS” by JOHN B. HASTED

Psychic research is an underrated branch of science; it is likely to lead to a depth of understanding of reality greater than that which we already have; and the social consequences of such an understanding could be very great. ….. although many observations have been made and some valuable knowledge obtained about the patterns of psychic behaviour, there is next to nothing which could be described as a theory by which the phenomena might be interpreted. The lack of such a theory has led to the observations themselves being discredited, and indeed there are various social and psychological pressures which reinforce this discredit. It is an interesting example of the thesis that scientific observations are often judged by social criteria.

Career

 

Professor Hasted was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he read chemistry. Hasted was born after the First World War, at a time when working men were denied free education, when universal health care had not been introduced and when the depression was really beginning to bite and have its appalling effects. 

The Jarrow March of 5–31 October 1936, for example, also known as the Jarrow Crusade, was an organised protest against the unemployment and poverty suffered in the British Tyneside town of Jarrow during the 1930s and took place when Hasted was 15.

The Church at the time took little interest in the plight of these men and Hasted became interested in Marxism as a solution.  He visited the WMA's London offices and launched the Oxford Workers' And Students' Choir.  Thus he had a streak of idealism and compassion that stayed with him throughout his life, although after he had served in the army during the Second World War, and seen Communism first hand, his ideas changed and he largely abandoned his far left political views.  The idealism, compassion and need to search for truth, however, was never abandoned.

During the years of the Second World War, Professor Hasted worked with the Telecommunications Research Establishment and then back in Oxford, he specialised in dielectric constants. In 1948 he became a University College London lecturer, while researching atomic physics. In 1964 his Physics Of Atomic Collisions was published.

The end of theoretical physics

 

The 60s saw some fundamental changes in the way theoretical physics evolved and for that matter chemistry, medicine and biology. 

America’s academics had turned to atheism and were pioneering materialism and science as the new religion.  We have explored this turn of events in the section Science as religion, which outlines the somewhat ludicrous direction so called science took at this time.

Scientists in the USA were not, as in the UK at the time, paid for by tax payers.  Instead they were paid for by company sponsors such as the pharmaceutical industry, the CIA or the military and as such science became inordinately influenced by politics, power and money.  Overall it ceased to be science.  The results are only now starting to be revealed.

In medicine, the USA has the unenviable record that the third most frequent cause of death, and well on the way to become the most frequent cause overall, is the medical profession with its pharmaceutical symptom based approach to medicine [please follow LINK for more details].  Those who sponsored research were the pipers who played the tune, and if the pharmaceutical companies asked for a pharmaceutical to be tested and found safe, it was done. 

Even more disturbing is the role science played in what is now termed Unethical human experimentation [see LINK for more details]. 

Cause based medicine seeks to find the ultimate cause
of an illness and tackle this, either with emotional help or
plant based remedies that do no harm.  It was dubbed 'alternative'
medicine in the USA and also largely ridiculed, as there was no
money to be made from curing anyone.  Symptom based
medicine requires the person to continually pay for
pharmaceuticals that only suppress the symptoms, thus
deluding them temporarily into thinking they are well, when in fact
the cause is still actively attacking them.

There was no money or power to be gained from religion or spiritual pursuits, both of which sought to place ethical brakes on the sort of scientific ‘research’ which either uses no data to come to its conclusions, or uses observations which are skewed to favour the outcome required, or which is simply totally unethical. 

In consequence anything even remotely ‘spiritual’, or which smacked of the supernormal was dismissed, and a concerted campaign used to discredit those attempting to study the area.  In the USA, it still is.

But quite a number of academics in the UK and Europe, along with a principled few in the USA, found the situation intolerable and unforgivable. 

Stephen Hawking, who at the time was occupant of Newton’s chair at Cambridge University, chose as a title for a lecture ‘Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?’   Professor John Wheeler, and Hasted expressed their own disquiet.  Paul Davies, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Newcastle on Tyne also expressed the dilemma facing the more open minded scientists in the following statement

In other words there is a plan, there is design and there is more to the world than random evolutionary events leading to entropy.  Halsted, Hawking, Wheeler et al also warned at the time that the theories then being developed failed to account for all the anomalous observations being recorded elsewhere in so called ‘paranormal’ experiments – but interestingly also in biology.  The work of Lyall Watson, and the findings documented in books such as Seasons of Life: The biological rhythms that enable living things to thrive and survive by Leon Kreitzman and Russell Foster, indicated that the world was not ‘physical’, it was system based, ‘informational’ if you prefer and based on, analogously, ‘programs’ that served to direct such things as homing pigeons, or telepathy, or the actions of organisms like the Portuguese man of war..

Hans Bender and Uri Geller, with Professors David Bohm, John Hasted and Ted Bastin

Hasted decided to set up a host of experiments to try to bring back into the fold of theoretical physics all the thousands upon thousands of observations rejected by the dogma of ‘Science as religion’. 

He also conducted a considerable number of experiments himself under controlled scientific conditions.  The experiments he meticulously conducted were into:

• Metal-bending – at a distance, using touch, extensions and contractions, movement of the surface of action, directional effects, hardening, softening and magnetization effects as well as fractures and cleavages
• Thermal , Electromagnetic, Optical and Structural phenomena
• Apporting – which he called teleportation
• Poltergeist experiences – including the movement of objects: psychokinesis
• Levitation – principally Human levitation

And he found all these phenomenon existed and could be proved.  He also included study of ‘Informational psychic phenomena’, as well as the many-universes interpretation of quantum theory and its implications.

 

Despite all that you may read in the rantings of those who have a vested interest in ensuring the world stays materialistic and science as a religion is preserved, he was not naïve, nor was he in any way duped – though why children of 5 years old should want to dupe a University Professor has not been explained by those who criticise his work.

Halsted tested Stephen North, a British psychic, in the late 1970s.  It was already well established that North had the ability to bend spoons and teleport objects in and out of sealed containers; Hasted was more interested at the time in trying to work out how it was done and thus provide an underlying theoretical framework, than he was in proving it was being done.  At the time, on BBC TV, a considerable number of children were appearing on Blue Peter and similar children’s programmes having great fun bending spoons until they looked more like Salvador Dali’s spoons, [this would not have been a coincidence because Dali was interested in this area too], as such it was being regarded  as somewhat commonplace – although without explanation.

Halsted’s extraordinary results deserve to be blazoned across the sky as the work of a scientist of extraordinary calibre, and yet he is virtually unknown outside the UK.  Perhaps we can alter this appalling discrepancy.

Folk career and death

 

Professor Hasted was also active as a folk singer, folk club organiser, and leading light of the Second British Folk Revival.  With A.L. Lloyd, he formed the Ramblers, a folk group which was modelled on such American groups as the Almanac Singers and the Weavers.  In 1956, Hasted had realigned the Ramblers folk group, to become the John Hasted Skiffle And Folksong Group.  They performed at the Forty-four  Skiffle and Folksong Club in Piccadilly – The band lasted with several lineup changes until 1959.

• John Hasted (guitar/banjo)
• John Cole (harmonica)
• Paul Fineberg (clarinet)
• Dennis Finn (washboard)
• Chaim Morris (double bass)
• Judith Goldblum (vocals)
• Redd Sullivan (vocals)
• Shirley Collins (vocals)

 In the late 1950s came his accompaniments for Dominic Behan's Irish Songs Recalled and Shirley Collins's Sweet England, and False True Lovers. In 1958, he visited the US to meet scientists, and Woody Guthrie, which incidentally, is a most telling fact in itself.   He also had a number of records [old 78s] released.

He was married and had twin daughters and a son.  He had twin daughters from his first marriage to Elizabeth Gregson. His second wife, Lynn, died in 1988; and they had one son.   It was his second wife who persuaded him to focus on science, from 1968 until his retirement in 1984, when he was head of experimental physics at Birkbeck.

Professor John Barrett Hasted, physicist and musician, born February 17 1921; died May 4 2002, aged 81.

Birkbeck College Physics Department 1983
Back Row : Alan Appleton, Peter Trent, David Butt, John Hirsch, Malcolm Coupland, Basil Hiley, Keith Higgins
Front Row : John Jennings, John Hasted, David Bohm

References

It is worth adding that in the acknowledgements to his book Professor Hasted indicated that in collecting the observations, he had a team of assistants and helpers, all of whom witnessed the phenomena  - David Robertson, Nick Nicola, Sadeq Kadifachi, Ken Jacobs, Brian Warford, Tony Walker, two Bill Marshes, David Bohm, Arthur Ellison, Arthur Koestler, Brian Inglis and George Owen.

an open mind is a wonderful thing ......

Observations

For iPad/iPhone users: tap letter twice to get list of items.

• David Nemeth – Bends the key to his mother’s poisons cupboard when it is in her pocket
• Dr Auguste Stern - The technique used in the Soviet Union to induce human levitation is to enclose the prone subject within a cube of mirrors
• Hasted, Professor John - Affecting the electrical properties of a transistor
• Hasted, Professor John - Levitation, who and how
• Hasted, Professor John - Various demonstrations of Micro Psychokinesis
• Hasted, Professor John – 01 Spoon bending - Introduction
• Hasted, Professor John – 02 Spoon bending - With Geller, 5 February 1974
• Hasted, Professor John – 03 Spoon bending - Spoon softening
• Hasted, Professor John – 04 Spoon bending - Metal bending by Stephen North
• Hasted, Professor John – 05 Spoon bending - Bending a disc shaped single crystal of molybdenum of about 1 cm diameter
• Hasted, Professor John – 06 Spoon bending - The remarkable abilities of Jean Pierre Girard
• Hasted, Professor John – 07 Spoon bending - The action of the metal bender Julie Knowles on a very long thin strip of aluminium
• Hasted, Professor John – 08 Spoon bending - The metal bending skills of Japanese boy, Masuaki Kiyota
• Hasted, Professor John – 09 Spoon bending - A summary of children and adults who were involved in metal bending research
• Hasted, Professor John – 10 Spoon bending - Bending of a single crystal of zinc stroked between the fingers and thumb by Graham P
• Hasted, Professor John – 11 Spoon bending - Extreme deformation of metal objects
• Hasted, Professor John – 12 Spoon bending - Andrew G and the ‘paperclip scrunch’
• Hasted, Professor John – 13 Spoon bending - Metal pieces bent inside hermetically sealed glass tubes
• Hasted, Professor John – 14 Spoon bending - Dr Wolkowski ‘s experiments on Metal pieces bent inside sealed glass tubes
• Hasted, Professor John – 15 Spoon bending - Structural examination of an abnormal plane bend produced by Willie G indicates a different crystal structure was formed
• Hasted, Professor John – 16 Spoon bending - Dr Ronald Hawke of Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory and no-touch experiments
• Hasted, Professor John – 17 Spoon bending - Using the strain gauge in no touch bending
• Hasted, Professor John – 18 Spoon bending - The detection of metal-bending action by children using a strain gauge
• Hasted, Professor John – 19 Spoon bending - Paranormal cleavage
• Hasted, Professor John – 20 Spoon bending - Vacancy formation might be regarded as teleportation on a microscopic scale
• Hasted, Professor John – 21 Spoon bending - Julie Knowles and the effect of distance upon spoon bending ability
• Hasted, Professor John – 22 Spoon bending - Changes of mood and its effect on the success of spoon bending
• Hasted, Professor John – 23 Spoon bending - Twisting a single metal strip about its own axis without touch
• Hasted, Professor John – 24 Spoon bending - Producing accurately formed parabolas as much as 30 cm long without touch
• Hasted, Professor John – 25 Spoon bending - Softening and hardening
• Hasted, Professor John – 26 Spoon bending - Induction by inanimate objects rather than by people
• Hasted, Professor John – 27 Spoon bending - Social dangers that might come upon us as a result of our new-found knowledge of metal-bending
• Hasted, Professor John – A summary of some important features of the teleportation phenomenon
• Professor John and Lynn Halstead – 01 Poltergeists and psychokinesis – I have had to live with poltergeist phenomena and the experiences are not easily forgotten
• Professor John and Lynn Halstead – 02 Poltergeists and psychokinesis –A small Japanese marine ivory statuette of an old peasant appeared in the air and then fell to the floor
• Professor John and Lynn Halstead – 03 Poltergeists and psychokinesis – Lynn and I were to find in the subsequent weeks that objects apparently reappearing on the other side of solid walls was a common feature of these phenomena
• Professor John and Lynn Halstead – 04 Poltergeists and psychokinesis – Lynn and I found we could produce paranormal clock chimes by this ritual for a period of more than eight weeks
• Professor John and Lynn Halstead – 05 Poltergeists and psychokinesis – The appearance of a turkey liver