Kruskal can read your mind and the mind of God

Gordon sent me a fun trick invented by physicist Martin David Kruskal. He can read your mind. Choose a random word in the first 3 verses of the Bible. So many choices!

Count the number of letters \(N\) in that word \(W\) and find the next word that is \(N\) words after the word \(W\); for example, if you chose "heaven" in the first verse, you will have \(N=6\) and jump to "earth" in the following one; overlook the digits and punctuation marks. If you landed in the 7th verse, stop. Otherwise return by two sentences in this blog post and repeat the instruction again and again.




Let me use the King James Bible as the text:

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

Which word from the 7th verse did you get?




Your humble correspondent has used the Kruskal coordinates to penetrate inside your brain and he knows what word you got:

It's "God", isn't She? What else could it have been? After all, it's the Bible, stupid. ;-)

Miraculous, right? Alternatively, see this text page or this similar card trick.

It would actually work with much longer (and fewer) words than those at the beginning of the Bible.