60 



SYDNEY T. KLEIN ON THE INVISIBLE IS THE KEAL, 



change; and even if we now look out of the window it requires 

 quite an effort to reahse that we are not going back to our 

 starting point. In the course of everyday hfe we are hurried 

 about in trains and motor cars and feel sometimes that we would 

 like to escape for a time from the rush of continual movement; 

 we say we will lie down on a sofa ; but we are still being rushed 

 through space a thousand times faster than an express train, 

 though we have no knowledge of this, or the direction in which 

 we are being carried. If the sofa is placed due east and west 

 and we lie down at noon, we are being carried along at 60,000 

 miles an hour, the rate of the earth moving on its orbit round 

 the sun. We are at first being carried, say, feet foremost, but 

 in six hours time, without changing our position, we should 

 be travelling sideways, and in a further six hours we should 

 still be carried along, at the same enormous rate, but the direction 

 would then be head foremost, and yet we should be quite oblivious 

 of any change of direction. 



I have showm elsewhere"^' under present conditions our concep- 

 tions of the immense and minute in the extension of Space, 

 and the quick and slow in duration of Time, are pure 

 illusions, they are based entirely on relativity. If at this 

 moment we and all our surroundings were reduced to half 

 their size and moving twice as quickly we could have 

 no knowledge of any change; even if our Solar system were 

 reduced to the size of one of the myriads of atoms in a needle 

 point, so that the whole visible universe was reduced to the size 

 of that point, each star taking the place of one of those atoms, 

 and time w^ere reduced in the same proportion, so that our earth 

 would be revolving round the sun at approximately the rate that 

 light travels, the condition which we know is actually taking 

 place inside every atom to which I shall refer later, we could 

 still have no knowledge of any change, our life would go on as 

 usual. If the change were made in the direction of expansion 

 in space and slowing down in time, so that each atom in that 

 needle point became as large as our Solar system and the steel 

 point as large as the visible universe, each atom taking the place 

 of a star and motion reduced in the same proportion, it is still 

 inconceivable that we could be conscious of any change having 

 taken place, though the length of our needle, which was at first, 

 say, an inch, would now be so great that light, travelling 186,000 

 miles per second, would take 500,000 years to traverse its length ; 

 and the stature of each one of us would be so great that light 

 would require 36,000,000 years to travel from head to foot; and 

 that 36,000,000 years would have to be multiplied 163,000,000 

 times, making 5,868 millions of millions of years to represent the 

 time that an ordinary sneeze w^ould take under such conditions. 



* Science and the Infinite, pp. 13-16. 



