“If you had been born and raised on a moving train, no one could
convince 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 futility of such an effort, have taken
into consideration that what things ‘are’ depends upon the person
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, Einstein, has been
unable to express knowledge in terms of pure relativity; he has had
to accept the velocity of light as an arbitrarily 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 hadn’t spoken.
“The thing that interests us now, and that mystifies modern
mathematicians, 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 orbit around the sun. A change of _relative_
position. But the mere translation of an isolated object existing alone
in space is mathematically inconceivable; for there is no such thing as
space in that sense.”
“I thought you said something about going into another universe--” I
interrupted again.
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 scene is changed around us; we are
somewhere else; and yet we haven’t _moved_ at all.
“Or suppose you could cast off gravitational attraction for a moment
and let the earth rotate under you; you would be going somewhere, and
yet not moving----”
“But that is theory; you can’t tinker with gravitation----”
“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 between you and the floor of
the elevator is greater than before--and that’s like gravitation is
anyway: inertia and acceleration. But we are talking about translation.
The position of everything in the universe must be referred to some
sort of coordinates. Suppose we change the angle or direction of the
coordinates: then you have ‘gone somewhere’ and yet you haven’t moved,
nor has anything else moved.”