John Gerald Taylor (18 August 1931 – 10 March 2012) was a British physicist and author. He is notable for writing a book critical of paranormal phenomena. Biography Taylor attended King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford and Mid-Essex Polytechnic, before gaining MA (Cantab) and PhD degrees from Christ's College, Cambridge (1950–1956). He had a wide-ranging academic career in mathematical physics and artificial intelligence. He was an emeritus professor and Director of the centre for Neural Networks at King's College London and guest scientist of the Research Centre at the Institute of Medicine in Jülich, Germany. From 2007 to 2012, Taylor led a unique research program at Commerzbank's Alternative Investment Strategies (COMAS) Group. The program used artificial intelligence techniques to create portfolios of hedge funds. This is the first program of its kind in the fund of hedge funds industry. In 2011, Taylor co-founded Commonwealth Capital Management LLP together with Nathaniel Philip Rothschild and Mehraj Mattoo. The company launched its first systematic fund of CTAs on Deutsche Bank's dbSelect platform based on Taylor's artificial intelligence models developed while he worked at COMAS. His previous positions and interests, while still at King's College, were in mathematics and physics. He was the author of many popular books. Taylor also trained as an actor and performed in plays and films, wrote several science fiction plays and directed stage productions in Oxford and Cambridge. Parapsychology Taylor, after witnessing spoon bending by Uri Geller, became interested in parapsychology. At first he believed that Geller's feats as well as other alleged paranormal phenomena were genuine. He wrote a book titled Superminds (1975) in which he argued for a physical explanation for the paranormal. He believed the explanation for extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, spoon bending and other paranormal phenomena may be found in electromagnetism. However, experiments that he conducted under laboratory conditions were negative which left him sceptical regarding the validity of paranormal phenomena. Taylor had tested children in metal bending. According to Martin Gardner the controls were inadequate as the children would put paper clips in their pockets and later take one out twisted or be left with metal rods unobserved. James Randi managed to bend an aluminium bar when Taylor was not looking and scratch on it "Bent by Randi". In other experiments two scientists from Bath University examined metal bending with children in a room which was secretly being videotaped through a one-way mirror. The film