The subsection of physics (not recognized by the professional institutions) to which para- physicists subscribe. Paraphysicists are professionally qualified physicists who investigate claims of the paranormal in the belief that their expertise as physicists gives them a special ability to examine such claims. For approximately 100 years, there have been a number of physicists who could be so described: Sir William Fletcher Barrett, Sir William Crookes, John B. Hasted, and Sir Fred Hoyle among them.
It is difficult to generalize about such a group when physics itself has been subject to such great change. Today, paraphysicists fall into two groups: those who believe that paranormal phenomena, such as especially, are real and have an explanation within the known scientific range for example, John Taylor, who concluded by a process of elimination that paranormal phenomena must be electromagnetic; and second, those who believe that paranormal phenomena are real but that the explanation for them must he in some hitherto unknown aspect of quantum mechanics for example, that there is an infinite series of quantum levels of which we as yet only know the uppermost and that paranormal events take place in lower levels.