- 12 - 1. 6 Physics is undesired One could have assumed that parapsychology would look for a physical explanation for its successfully verified phenomena to begin with. Amongst the founders of the British Society for Psychic Research were, as we have been informed, also respected physicists. They had honestly endeavoured to find an explanation for these incomprehensible apparitions from within their own field of expertise well before Professor Rhine appeared on the scene. The physical view of the world at that time, one that was shaped by the ironclad laws of Isaak Newton, did not allow such an explanation. They came to the conclusion that paranormal phenomena were not subject to Newton’s laws. But as these laws were not prepared to allow for exceptions, it could only mean that another WORLD ORDER must exist next to the physical world order. • Hidden like in a Russian doll, a second WORLD must be hidden in our world, one that obeyed completely unknown laws. Both of these worlds could apparently exist side by side without colliding with one another. The physicists of the Society for Psychic Research naturally found themselves in significant logical distress with this assumption. The fact that they admitted the existence of the unexplainable, speaks volumes about their unprejudiced spirit of inquiry. But 30 years later, when Professor Rhine undertook the experiments with playing cards, the world had considerably changed: • Einstein had declared that there were also other dimensions besides the ones that we were able to recognise here on our Earth. His Theory of Relativity had changed physical matter, the solid ground under our feet, into less than concrete, fleeting energy. Even time itself had become an unsteady factor, one that one could no longer securely rely upon as before. • Quantum theory eventually gave the old, stipulated view of the world of physics an impetus that nothing and nobody was able to glue together again. Men like Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Born, de Broglie, Dirac, Schrödinger and many more, whose names have entered the history of modern physics, were shaking the throne of the old sciences that had been so hostile towards everything supernatural. Parapsychology’s chance had arrived. It would have been easy for it to make the new and unintelligible, well downright illegible appearing physics of an Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg its own basis. Psychologists only had to declare: We also have our place somewhere here in this unexplored REALM; this is where we want to explore. Such a decision would certainly not have been out of place. Newton’s macrophysical laws had given parapsychology an explicit rebuff. But why should the causes for paranormal phenomena not be found in legalities that take place below the order of magnitude of atoms? Parapsychology has up to now paradoxically avoided the golden bridge that was built for it. Instead of becoming a branch of science within physics, it rather turned into the domain of psychologists. This is indeed understandable, because the exploration of the human psyche gained decisive and rapid progresses during the last decades; one hopes that one will soon be able to fathom paranormal events with the help of these progresses.
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