ABSTRACT
In that parody of a Christian ritual, Philip Pullman transforms the magical effect of a scientific instrument, the radiometer, into a holy relic and satirizes religious homilies by drawing a moral message from its mysterious action in the presence of light. When the radiometer was first constructed in the mid-1870s it must have seemed an extraordinary and mysterious object and one that might, indeed, link the worlds of material scientific reality with the mysterious and religious unknown. It also brought about a mighty row of the kind that Victorian men of science delighted in.2 Crookes had many rows during his long career. None, perhaps, was more spectacular than the six-year-long running feud with the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter that forms the subject of this chapter.
