Januaby 21, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



113 



Even the reading knowledge of natural 

 tongues required for study or reference would 

 be immediately reduced to a minimum, be- 

 cause large amounts of matter wbicb at pres- 

 ent are not translated into the national lan- 

 guages, for no other reason than that the de- 

 mand for it in each tongue will not justify the 

 expense, could be translated into the accepted 

 international idiom, as it would then have the 

 world for a market. Every year this mini- 

 mum would steadily approach zero, as new 

 theories and methods superseded old and were 

 given to the world by their authors, in Es- 

 peranto. 



The desirability of having an author's own 

 words and expressions, whether one is study- 

 ing him privately or quoting from his works, 

 is only another reason why that author, when 

 desiring to reach all the world, should write 

 in a common tongue, which all the world can 

 easily understand, and the acquisition of 

 which, to those chemists or other scientists of 

 the present day who already know English, 

 French and German, is but child's play. Such 

 should be willing to accept this " burden " ( ?), 

 in order that their less gifted brethren may 

 have also the advantages of reading in the 

 original, scientific matter to be hereafter re- 

 corded. 



We can not change the writings of the 

 past, but the book of the future is ours to 

 make or mar, and how better can we fill its 

 pages than by recording the new triumphs of 

 science in one language, an international lan- 

 guage, which even her humblest worshipper 

 may readily acquire? J. D. Hailman 



PiTTSBUBGH, 



December 13, 1909 



RELATIVITY AND SOME OF ITS CONSEQUENCES 



The discussion of relativity in the recent 

 meeting of the American Physical Society in 

 Boston was a serious disappointment to me. 

 It interfered with some of my future plans, 

 and it left me in the dark concerning how 

 those plans might be amended. 



I had intended, when I became a disem- 

 bodied spirit, to start outwards from my space 



locus at that instant, and to travel with twice 

 the velocity of light along my individual time 

 emanations, until I had reached the beginning 

 of my time career. I was, and am, curious to 

 see how that history would appear when re- 

 viewed backwards in this manner. I had then 

 planned to pause until my history should over- 

 take me again. This would give me a chance 

 to see myself as others had seen me. I had 

 previously realized that this would be a cruise 

 which would require a great deal of skill by 

 reason of the constantly changing position of 

 my individual time and space locus, due to 

 terrestrial and solar motion. Still I had 

 thought it possible to follow the tangled trail, 

 by keeping my course at right angles to the 

 daily and annual wave fronts, as they suc- 

 cessively presented themselves. 



It had seemed possible also to gain in this 

 manner the experimental data necessary in the 

 framing of a general system of vector analysis. 

 This system would enable one to start with the 

 space locus at which the earthly clay was 

 shaken off, and to locate with reference to it 

 any other point in his own time and space 

 career. An increase in the length of the space 

 vector in any direction would simultaneously 

 carry one outward in space, forward in time 

 and backward in history. 



The Boston discussion did not supply one 

 item of information which I had confidently 

 expected. It is necessary that one should, on 

 such a cruise, know the precise number of 

 cubic miles in a cubic year. This informa- 

 tion was not given us. In addition it was 

 revealed that it is not possible for any velocity 

 to be greater than that of light, or 3 X 10" cm. 

 per second. 



Is this conclusion final? We can see that 

 the waves which contain our spoken words lag 

 greatly on those which embody our visible 

 acts. May there not be some more refined 

 medium, a spiritual medium, perhaps, in which 

 V can exceed 3 X 10'° cm. per second? 



Evidently we must no longer sneeze at dis- 

 cussions concerning the relation between the 

 whereness of the when and the whenness of 

 the where. The equations placed on that 



