I was still slightly irritated at him and both revenge and prudence dictated to ignore the conversation. I read the notes instead:
. with the decisive step, all these things could be expressed in terms of a time including classical relativity, elementary geometry and reciprocally equivalent Galilei transformations, without resorting to any devious calibration curves, principles of indeterminacy and all the usual rigamarole. Newtonian mechanics remain valid. As an example, the square of the radius is implied in anything isotropic, such as gravitation and also time, but the fact that accelerations like that produced by gravitation involve time as a function, that scientists have been squaring time as the most natural thing in the world, constitutes a tacit acceptance of the validity of this theory and makes it self-evident.
All problems and phenomena which appear incapable of explanation or understanding because we insist on considering them as isolated and disconnected become simple in a universe which is connected and immobile and they resolve into the shape of things, the pattern. Problems of action at a distance evaporate because the universe is one, continuous, solid, rigid, and there is no action. Force and acceleration reduce to the difference between sets of coordinates. Laws of physics become platitudinous to the point of idiocy when thus stated. The laws of motion appear self-evident; the first law is tantamount to saying that a line is straight until it bends; the second law, that the rate of separation between a certain curve and any of its tangents increases as both are produced; the third law is equivalent to the division of an angle by the fourth perpendicular.
It all boils down to the statement of a structure in which the words “fourth coordinate” and the deviations from it are substituted for the words “time and motion.” The result is the same, but the intuitive implications of the words commonly used only succeed in rendering the concept more confused and elusive.
I was going to address a remark to the Moor, my irritation having left me during my efforts to concentrate amidst the conversation and music around me, but he was deep in the subject of music, praising the orchestral grand stunts of Strauss and maintaining that his Till Eulenspiegel was the most remarkable production of modern times. This led to further discussions of fine points of what one might mean by “modern” and the beginning of an epoch, and he and de los Rios discussed new harmonics and acoustic effects and their validity. He soon linked these things to the same desire to escape the boredom of repetition and accused Beethoven of being as exhaustive as Newton and therefore leaving little if anything for others to do along fundamental lines. The manner in which he jumped from one thing to another was extraordinary and I don’t know how de los Rios managed to keep pace with him so easily.
He had been playing the weird number four of the Kreisleriana and now played number six. It held us spellbound with its unearthly beauty which became even sadder in the unexpected dance tempo, and then he began to discuss Schumann’s artificial fingering and systems of inducing cramped positions of the hands in order to bring out a particular voice, and he played some more of his things as an illustration. It was all highly technical, so I read some more — from the pan into the fire:
. they refuse to take the plunge. They who have assumed so many things, who accepted ether so tenuous that everything could move through it without resistance, yet was so rigid as to propagate things at unheard-of speeds; they who accepted so many contradictory hypotheses and maddening conclusions, who have carried open-mindedness to the point where there is nothing more to open, refuse to take the decisive, final plunge, refuse to lift the frame of the little machine. Anything but that. And yet, that would explain so many things, as Lagrange said of the hypothesis of a Creator, except that here the problem would be dissolved, rather than solved. The contradictions of the ether disappear. It can be the most rigid thing imaginable and at the same time offer no resistance to motion, because there is nothing to resist, there is no motion.
I put a question to him which I thought would go unheeded, but he caught it:
“Of course, the darn thing is as rigid as can be — dead and stiff, that’s it. The universe is dead but one cannot admit that fact. The Olympian optimism. In decent, cultured, well-to-do society, it is not proper to speak of death, one avoids this word and the verb ‘to die’ as almost obscene. Nice people only refer to this fact as ‘passing on,’ or ‘away.’ Nice people never die. One can die only on the wrong side of town and a man must cross the tracks before he can die simply, in peace. Anything else would be a misdemeanor. Mind you, people may be dying everywhere like flies, but this is considered bad taste. Never mind if people are decimated, the thing is inadmissible, one must be optimistic and suggest other possibilities. One cannot come out and say that someone died, or that something is dead. It is shocking, revolting — and yet the universe is not passing on or away as many well-bred scientists have insisted, because there is no motion and despite our scruples, nothing is passing. The universe has been, or is, dead all its life, to speak like Berlios.”
This put us back into music. Out of the vast tracts of records that covered the walls of an adjoining room, he picked unerringly the album he wanted and in no time at all had a record spinning on the phonograph, a tremendous contraption wired to loudspeakers distributed through the walls, with two turntables so perfectly synchronized that one could detect no break between two records. The music took possession of the room with majestic pride. It was the Leonora No. 3 overture.
“Nothing much to do with Berlios, but listen to that, Dr. Jesucristo. It comes at you from afar, straight at you and then explodes over your head like a storm of eloquence. Much good music has created the impression of latitude, but this one adds to that the impression of depth, of acoustic perspective. It reminds me of that,” he pointed at a reproduction of a picture of Toledo by El Greco which hung on the wall. “It is the empress of overtures, the most dignified and arrogant, the most subjugating and convincing.” He stopped the machine when the music had reached the fulfillment of its first section — exploded over our heads as he said. I was now working on a dish of ropa vieja and his Cuban boy filled my glass with a light red wine, whose color tended more to the vermillion and whose taste left an aftermath on the palate, like a dark shadow of ineffable delight. From my bacchic heaven I considered the Chink’s dish of rice and concluded that if I lifted “the frame of the little machine,” as one might do the cover in an elegant restaurant, I would find that, four dimensionally considered, it was really a dish of spaghetti. Logical but insane.
I set down my dish on the vast moroccan cushion where I was sitting and picked up the Moor’s notes:
. there is no motion; hence, the impossibility of explaining it — should be evident to anyone who has looked at the graph of a function.