. but there is no motion; not only absolute motion, as the relativists timidly claim, but no motion at all — only inclinations between the fourth perpendicular and the other three. Only extensions. The reasons for the impossibility of detecting absolute motion become obvious, as this is the same as determining which of several intersecting lines is separating from the others — a meaningless question.
Descartes, with his analytic geometry, gave the key to this simple fact. The obvious clue was there, but almost all failed or refused to see it, and if that had not been enough, the elegant notion of the hodograph conceived by my illustrious countryman and spiritual ancestor should have made matters even plainer, if that were necessary.
I stopped reading to put a few questions to the Moor and in answer he disclaimed any originality in these theories. He reviewed the bold encompassing of Minkowski, the optimistically conditioning analogies of Hinton and crystal clear digest of Ouspensky, as some of the few who were on the right track and then others since Lagrange’s well-founded suspicions. He bowed politely to Gauss and bypassed non-Euclidians to end in a swift curtsy before Riemann and run his hands over the piano in irrelevant improvisation that climbed the upper register and kept going to reach for the bottle of wine standing guard there and he continued to theorize. I turned back to the notes. At least I could try to reread their meaning, but to follow his arboriform conversation was too much.
Yet the very great majority rejected it, could not admit that time and motion are but the impression we receive from four-dimensional extensions, and they continued to build their physics and mechanics upon three-dimensional projections and slides and shadows.
He was playing again from Chopin, something sad, sorrowful to the point of lugubriousness: “He was a sick man, no doubt of that,” he said half to himself, “but in other things he showed tremendous force and rebellion — vitality. Berlioz made a mistake in judging him with a banal cruelty induced by the desire, fashionable at the time, of making one more phrase. Chopin was not dead all his life. He has not died yet.” He stopped and spun on the stool to face de los Rios: “It was a hasty judgment drawn from a few instances. Short-sighted, exactly like the others.”
Contemporary scientists have tried to compromise, had to admit certain facts that could not be denied any longer, but instead of lifting the frame, they began to look at it through telescopes and microscopes and measure it with sidereal or more or less ingenious chronometers, only to become involved in greater contradictions and end in dismal surrender. Anything rather than let go of the intuitive concept of time. It is that insane fear of the absolute which blinds them. As their contributing concession, they admitted time as a fourth coordinate in the strictly mathematical sense, whatever that means; as if it had not been used already as such for centuries — but never in the literal sense.
Further on I read:
. and this apparently formidable and elementary geometric objection to taking higher dimensions literally, because of supposed inconsistency with a change of coordinates, can be easily dealt with.
If it was elementary and easy, the formulas and line of reasoning that followed escaped me. I resented the patent implication and rather than put the blame foolishly on my ignorance, I placed it squarely and justly on the involved, obscure and careless style of the author. It was a consolation to know that, had this elementary and easy question been presented correctly and clearly, I would have grasped it without difficulty, but I refrained from asking the Moor or Dr. de los Rios to elucidate. Like Don Quixote with his helmet visor, I did not want to expose my mended vanity to a second test. I imagine that he considered relativists as outmoded and not entirely in good faith. He was poking fun at them in the next note I read:
Newton’s experiment with the spinning vessel full of liquid as a proof of absolute motion, never quite satisfactorily explained away by semi-modern physics, becomes positively inconvenient by adding another equally filled vessel revolving at the same time but in opposite direction and the effect on relativists should be devastating— Dizzily they pick up all their popularizing tackle: Fitzgerald “contraptions,” elastic and non-elastic rods, fast and slow clocks, light signals, free-falling elevators and sidereal swift-traveling twins who turn out younger than each other, and decide to go home to flatland aboard their equivalence hypothesis and call it a day; when by considering the experiment in the light of this theory, as a helix extension, there would have been no cause for embarrassment.
He was playing again that ending of the Carnaval’s first part, running through the rapid dog-chases-cat section that rounded up in that magnificent conclusion. He seemed to like that and spoke about it, but I was paying no attention.
. there is no motion, but physicists are too timid to admit this. It is this timidity that makes them give up so easily at the first setback. They experimented with light and without bothering to ascertain its nature and, with the least-founded assumptions about that of its propagation, became utterly demoralized because the results of their experiment were negative. One of the most disconcerting conclusions of the experiment was that light behaved as if the earth were standing still, which after all, it does since nothing is moving, but a conclusion intolerable to anyone donning a snobbish Copernican modesty as a necessary accessory to debunking progress — and they gave up too easily.
The fact that an experiment fails our reason should not disconcert one to such an extent, but only make one doubt the validity of the conclusions it implies and the things which it assumes. One might even consider light as an extension in a fifth dimension, which would account for its crossing all objects at the same rate regardless of their speed or direction. Who knows? Might be worth investigating this line of reasoning. Let us say that it crosses our four-dimensional field and the inclination at which it crosses it is what we measure as its velocity. From experiments, it would appear that this inclination is constant In short, they have not measured the velocity of light at all, but merely a cross section of it. Got everything upside down. Don’t know what it’s all about.
All this made me dizzy and I know that Garcia, who had been reading over my shoulder, often holding a page I wanted to turn, was flabbergasted. I was ready to give up, like a timid physicist. It was too complicated and removed from everyday experience, although the Moor did not seem to think so:
. quite simple. Add one more coordinate and the difficulties disappear — the complete panacea that cures all ailments of physics and philosophy. But I don’t think they want to take that medicine. They will swallow any other pill, assume anything but higher dimensionalities taken literally. They refuse to make this one fundamental assumption, but instead they assumed all kinds of ethers, when the fear of dimensions — a real case of logarithmic agrophobia that leads them to the most outlandish acrobatics on the parallels of the equality sign, in order to duck any exponent higher than the third — was the anesthetizing ether that rendered them totally incapable of seeing the obvious. They accepted non-Euclidian geometries — more mathemacrobatics on other pseudo-parallels — and produced many innocent and disarming little admissions springing coyly out of a hat like tame rabbits charged with some infectious virus. Everything under the spell of their favorite magic wand which by moving swiftly past our noses like an admonishing nightstick, changed into a stupefying blackjack — the well-known contracting rod, their most reliable weapon — when, on the contrary, one glance even at my little machine shows that it should grow long as a fishing pole with all its implications.