ABSTRACT
The British philosopher of Science, Mary Hesse, in an article entitled “Action at a Distance,” after commenting that the contemporary discussion about that topic did not raise extra-physical problems about the nature of life and mind, although it had done so prior to the 18th century, went on to predict an early revival of these problems.
And it may be that its obvious connection with the ostensible phenomena of extra-sensory perception will in the near future raise all these problems again, and in a more extreme form, for these phenomena, if veridical, seem to involve not only ‘jumps’ across space and time of regular and determinate amounts, but also a certain independence of space and time. Since existing physical theories, of continuous and distance action alike, have always depended on regular variations in space and time, this is one of the features of para-normal phenomena which makes their theoretical expression exceptionally difficult. But if the history of physics is any guide, it seems that if some theoretical explanation is available, its agreement with pre-conceived notions of matter and action is less important than its intrinsic simplicity, predictive power, and correspondence with the facts. It would therefore be rash to conclude that para-normal phenomena, or any other distance notions, do not occur, merely on a priori grounds. 1
