J. Havelock Fidler read Zoology and Botany at Cambridge before studying Agricultural Entomology for hist doctorate at Reading University. He has spent over thirty years in agricultural research and became interested in dowsing in 970. Since then he has devised a number of quantitative methods in relation to dowsing and has published several articles on the subject in specialist journals.
Born in the UK in 1927, Irving went on to complete his undergraduate training in geology at Cambridge. In June of 1951, he was recruited to assist British geophysicist, Keith Runcorn, whose pioneering studies of paleomagnetism provided early evidence in support of the theory of continental drift. They collected samples from the Torridonian Sandstone of Northwest Scotland for a paleomagnetic study. This work was to become the start of Irving’s PhD.
Irving was also instrumental in the early development of the magnetometer so that it could be adapted to measure rock magnetism. His 1954 PhD thesis included measurements from the Indian Deccan Traps which indicated that, since the early Tertiary, ‘India had moved from the Southern Hemisphere through 53º of latitude and had rotated counterclockwise by 28º, a motion required by (the then-controversial continental drift theory of) Wegener’.
In his last year as a PhD student at Cambridge, Irving applied to work in a research position at The Australian National University (ANU). He was offered a Research Fellowship in geophysics and arrived in Canberra in January 1955.
Alick Bartholomew (1930-2015) studied geology and geography at the University of Cambridge and University of Chicago. He was part of the editorial team that in 1962 published Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In 1971 he founded the Turnstone Press, publisher of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, with a vision to reconcile science with a spiritual view of the world. In 1984 he started Gateway Books in Bath, England, continuing the Turnstone vision as well as introducing scientific paradigms, such as a study of the crop circle phenomenon, the scientific evidence for geological catastrophism, and Mae-Wan Ho’s critique of genetic engineering.
Australian botanist: b. Pontefract, England, 1856. He went to Australia in 1874, where he joined the staff of the Government Gardens at Brisbane and remained for five years, when he became botanist to the Department of Agriculture of New South Wales, and consulting botanist to the West Australian government.