Nevertheless, Ostoja must have been slightly overawed by what was now suggested to him. Sinclair wanted Ostoja to conduct a seance at his house to which would be invited not only Einstein, but Richard Tolman, soon to be chief scientific adviser to the Manhattan Project, and Paul Epstein, Caltech's professor of theoretical physics. When the evening came, Sinclair addressed the learned crowd, warning them not to panic. At a previous seance Ostoja had managed to levitate a table while in a trance.
Helen Dukas, Einstein's secretary, remembered being "frightened to death" by the proceedings. Ostoja went into a cataleptic trance and began mumbling incomprehensible words. Each of the guests was invited to ask him questions. Silence fell, the table shook, "and then," remembered Dukas, "nothing happened." Sinclair was distraught. He grumbled about "non-believers" being present at the table.
Curiously enough, when Einstein was asked, years later, about his beliefs in the telepathic experiments of Dr JB Rhine, then studying parapsychology at Duke University, he stressed his scepticism in strictly scientific terms. All of Rhine's experiments had reported that psi-forces did not decline with distance, unlike the four known forces of nature -- gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.
"This suggests to me a very strong indication that a non-recognized source of systematic errors may have been involved," Einstein wrote.
Indeed it was scientific fallacies such as these, rather than drawing room seances, that could most reliably send a shiver up Einstein's spine. When he was confronted with seemingly illogical phenomena in quantum mechanics -- where particles appear to communicate instantaneously with each other -- he chose to label it in terms more suited to one of Sinclair's seances as "spooky action-at- a-distance."
RSS