Evening star., 1938-04-16
PREDICTS CARDS
PRIOR TO SHUTTLE
Student at Duke Performs
an Unbelievable Feat,
DR.. Rhine Reveals.
By THOMAS r. HENRY,
etaff Correspondent of The Star.

unbelievable that DR.. J. B. Rhine,
whose card-reading experiments in
clairvoyance and telepathy have got
ten scientists as we'll as the general
public to the hair-pulling stage, was
afraid to talk about it.
The boy read pack of cards before
they were shuffled as they would be
after they were shuffled.
It was, II the results were valid,
the first experimental evidence Of the
ability OF the human mind to move
in a fourth dimension, to 60 both
backwards and forwards in time.
DR. Albert Einstein and his fellow
relativists had been talking of some
thing Of the sort and actually demon
strating it mathematically for very
great periods Of time-things alto
gether beyond the scope Of human ex-
perience.
Announces Experiments.
Here was concrete case. Ever
since DR.. Rhine has been repeating
the tests and checking the results,
mentioning them only confidentially
to friends. He couldn't find where he
was wrong in the first place. Today
he boldly announced the experiments
to the world in a journal issued by
his own university.
The same issue contains an offer
from DR.. J. McKeen Cattell, dean of
American psychologists, member Of
the National Academy OF Sciences and
former president of the American As
sociation for the Advancement Of
Science, to bet that the whole card
reading phenomenon is plain bunk
For some reason or other DR.. Cattell
wants odds-$l0O to $l20-that If any
OF the experiments are carried out in
his Office under his supervision there
will be no more correct gueSses than
are assured by pure chance, one out
Of five.
At the same time an eminent
American physicist-his name would
be known to everybody if it could be
revealed, DR.. Rhine says-writes that
he has tried the card-reading expert
n1ents on himself and gotten some ex-
traordlnary results. He remains anony-
nous for fear of getting in wrong
with his colleagues and the institution
for which he works
One Card Out Of Five.
The technique of DR.. Rhine's ex-
trasensory perception experiments now
Is we'll known. There Is a deck of
IS cards containing five cards each of
five different geometrical designs.
When such deck is shuffled a person
should be able, by chance alone, to
guess right one card out of each five.
II person does better than this
for number of trials. and all pos
sible clues and collisions are ruled
out. it is considered evidence--at least
by Dr. Rhine and his associates-that
something other than pure chance is
at work
Certain persons, Dr. Rhine asserts
and nobody yet has questioned the in
tegrity Of the Duke workers-do very
much better than chance. They can
read the cards through the face-down
deck either in the same room, across
the campus, or 5000 miles away
Whatever this sixth sense" may be
1t is not effected by space, which sets
1t aside from all the other senses The
farther away one looks at an object
the less distinct it is. The father away
one hears sound or perceives an odor
the DINNER are these Impressions
With extrasensory perception distance
makes no difference. If some actual
physical agents. such as some un-
81
passes from the cards to the reader,
or from one mind to another 1t ap-
parently moves at a speed faster than
light itself and none of it is absorbed
In the passage.
Experiments on Time.
1t was the apparent wiping out of
space that led to the experiments, DR..
Rhine reported today, to determine If
time also could be wiped out. Theo-
retically space and time are aspects
Of the same greater reality and, with
some interpretations of relatively, fu-
ture and past might be considered as
existing simultaneously and continu-
ously, just as North America and Eu-
rope exist simultaneously and continu-
ously
The difficulty is that man is chained
TO an ever progressing instant-the
present. Nobody can take a physical
trip into the past or into the future as
one can 60 from Washington to Lon
don. Nobody can go back and shake
hands with Julius Caesar or ahead and
meet the President of the United States
in the year 2000 But that, it may be,
is because of the nature OF mans mind
and not necessarily because of the
nature of the world in which man
lives. Lots of folks have claimed, of
course, that they were able to look
into the future. but today are generally
regarded as charlatans.
Hence comes the significance of the
results by DR.. Rhine today. The theo-
logical student at Duke-if the results
are accepted as valid and no other ex-
planation can be found for them
actually took trip into the future
under supposedly scientifically con-
trolled conditions, in . modern ply
Geological laboratory.
Agree With DIR. Cattell.
1t is only fair to say, however, that
most psychologists are in the camp of
DR.. Cattell They think something is
wrong with the experiments, although
they cannot exactly put their fingers
on what it is On the other hand,
some Of the country's foremost mathe-
maticians have indorsed publicly the
methods Of mathematical analysis
used by DR.. Rhine and his co-workers
and have protested over criticisms of
these methods by psychologists.
In series of trials the theological
students, and afterwards other Duke
graduate students, made an average of
more than 6 cards out Of rs right over
q series of hundreds of trials. On in
dividual trials some of them did much
better, but these do not count in DR..
Rhines technique.
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