Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10 — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

for my slowness of comprehension. “Merely relativity. It doesn’t take much physical effort to make the moon meve through the treetops, does it? Just enough to walk down the garden path.” T stared at him and he continued: “If you had beea bora and raised on a moving train, no one could con- vince you that the landscape was not in rapid motion, Well, our conception of the universe is quite as relative as that. Sir Isaac Newton tried in his mathematics to express a universe as though beheld by an infinitely removed and perfectly fixed observer. Mathematicians since his time, realizing the fu- tility of such an effort, have taken into consideration that what things ‘are’ de- peads upon the persoa who is looking at them. They have tried to express common knowledge, such as the law of gravitation, in terms that would hold good for all observers, Yet their leader and culminating genius, Eia- stein, has been unable to express knowledge in terms of pure relativity; he has had to accept the velocity of light as an arbitracily fixed constant. Why should the velocity of light be any more fixed and constant than any other quantity in the universe ? “But, what's that got to do with going into the fourth dimension?” I broke in impatiently. He continued as though I hada’t spoken. “The thing that interests us sow, ard that mystifies modern mathemati- cians, is the question of movement, or more accurately: translation. Is there such a thing as absolute translation? Can there be movement—translation—- except in relation to something else than the thing that moves? All movement we know of is movement in relation to other objects, whether it be a walk down the street, or the movement of the earth in its ocbit around the sua. A change of relative position. But the mere translation of an isolated object existing alone ia space is mathematically inconceivable; for there is no such thing as space in that sense,” | “I theaght you said something about going inte another universe—” [ interrupted apaia. You can't argue with Woleshensky. His train of thought went on without a break, "By translation we understand getting from one place to another. ‘Going somewhere’ originally meant a movement of our bodies. Yet, as a matter of fact, when we drive in an automobile, we ‘go somewhere’ without moving our bodies at all. The sceiie is changed around us; we are somewhere else; and yet we haven't woved at all. | “Or suppose you could cast off gravitational attraction for a moment and iet the earth rotate under you; you would be going somewhere, and yet not moving——" “But that is theory, you can’t tuker with gravilation——— “Every day you tinker with gravitation. When you start upwards in an elevator, your pressure, not your weight, against the floor of it is increased; apparent gravitation betweea you and the floor of the elevator is greater 9% ¥P comicbooks.com