Evening star., 1937-11-13
STARS, MEN AND ATOMS
Notebook of Science Progress in Field,
Laboratory and Study.
BY THOMAS X. HENRY.

If ninety-nine per cent Of mankind
were sightless the ability of the remain
ing one per cent to see-however dimly
and intermittently-would seem super
natural.
1t would be hard for them to prove that
they possessed this uncanny faculty of
vision. They would be denounced as
charlatans and liars Any psychologist
who paid attention to them would run
the risk Of being set down by his fellows
as a misguided romantic.
He might make out case for himself,
however, by reporting experiments to
show that this ability to see obeyed the
same fundamental physical laws which
governed the universally recognized
human sensory faculties.
The majority of mankind, it may be
assumed, could hear. Very precise eX-
perimentS may have been conducted to
determine the laws of sound 1t would be
a conclusion from common experience
that the loudness with which sound was
received depended directly on the inten-
sity and the distance away of the source.
A gun shot two miles away would not
sound so loud as the same gun shot two
hundred feet away. 1t would be atten-
uated in rather exact relation to the
length of its path.
Mankind might also have drawn from
common experience the valid conr'Isio
that the odor of a skunk was less often
sive half mile away from the offending
animal than ten feet away. Very precise
measurements of the rate of attenuation
of the aroma may have been made by the
worlds sightless physicists.
1t could be demonstrated for vision
that the more distant an object, every
thing else considered, the less sharply
it could be perceived. Thus the weird
faculty of sight would be made to fit
into the accepted framework of physical
phenomena 1t would have good, re-
spectacle, three -dimensional familiarity.
Turn now to this funny ESP game
everybody is playing these days. 1t ap-
parently demands-if the results are to
be taken at their face value--Some
medium of transmission and some means
of perception which the vast majority
of the human race never have expe-
rienced. One must be able to perceive" !"
somehow or other, through the back of
a playing card and the thick stone wall
of college laboratory. Those who sup
posedly have this faculty can't describe
it any more than the rare individual who
could see could describe the sensation
in terms which would mean anything to
a group all of whose members had been
blind since birth.
There would be fewer skeptics if DR..
j. B. Rhine, Duke University psychologist
who discovered the phenomenon, could
demonstrate an<acceptable physical basis
for the strange faculty. If it obeyed the
laws of sight, hearing and smell-the
known means of perception without di-
rect contact-it should:
Require a measurable time interval
between stimulus and response, depend
ing on their distance apart.
The response should become attenu-
ated with distance from the stimulus.
If these two requirements were full
filled the phenomenon could be made to
fit into the general pattern of the uni
verse of human experience. But rigidly
controlled experiments seem to show that
the faculty is independent of space.
There is no perceptible time interval re-
quired for transmission between North
Carolina and California. Distance does
not affect the strength Of the response.
-dimensional space drops out Of the
picture.