38 TIME 



me into the virginal four-dimensional world and we will 

 carve it anew on a plan which keeps them entirely 

 distinct. We can then resurrect the almost forgotten 

 time of consciousness and find that it has a gratifying 

 importance in the absolute scheme of Nature. 



But first let us try to understand why physical time 

 has come to deviate from time as immediately perceived. 

 We have jumped to certain conclusions about time and 

 have come to regard them almost as axiomatic, although 

 they are not really justified by anything in our immediate 

 perception of time. Here is one of them. 



If two people meet twice they must have lived the 

 same time between the two meetings, even if one of 

 them has travelled to a distant part of the universe and 

 back in the interim. 



An absurdly impossible experiment, you will say. 

 Quite so; it is outside all experience. Therefore, may 

 I suggest that you are not appealing to your experience 

 of time when you object to a theory which denies the 

 above statement? And yet if the question is pressed 

 most people would answer impatiently that of course 

 the statement is true. They have formed a notion of 

 time rolling on outside us in a way which makes this 

 seem inevitable. They do not ask themselves whether 

 this conclusion is warranted by anything in their actual 

 experience of time. 



Although we cannot try the experiment of sending a 

 man to another part of the universe, we have enough 

 scientific knowledge to compute the rates of atomic and 

 other physical processes in a body at rest and a body 

 travelling rapidly. We can say definitely that the bodily 

 processes in the traveller occur more slowly than the 

 corresponding processes in the man at rest (i.e. more 

 slowly according to the Astronomer Royal's time). This 



