Charles Nordmann

“ Is there a finer or nobler way of spending this life than [Pg 14] to fill one’s eyes, one’s mind, one’s heart with the immortal, yet so elusive, rays? What higher pleasure can there be than to contemplate, to seek, to understand, the magnificent and astounding spectacle of the universe?
There is in reality more of the marvellous and the romantic than there is in all our poor dreams. In the thirst for knowledge, in the mystic impulse which urges us toward the deep heart of the Unknown, there is more passion and more sweetness than in all the trivialities which sustain so many literatures. ”

“ It is the very essence of the august and lofty grandeur of science that it is perpetually advancing. It is like a torch in the sombre forest of mystery. Man enlarges every day the circle of light which spreads round him, but at the same time, and in virtue of his very advance, he finds himself confronting, at an increasing number of points, the darkness of the Unknown. Few men have borne the shaft of light so deeply into the forest as has Einstein. ”

“ In very rapid motion a square would seem to the observer a rectangle; a circle would appear to be an ellipse. If the earth travelled some thousands of times faster round the sun, we should see it elongated, like a giant lemon suspended in the heavens. If an aviator could fly at a fantastic speed over Trafalgar Square, in the direction of the Strand—and if the impressions on his retina were instantaneous—he would see the Square as a very flattened rectangle. ”

“ We now know that the same laws govern mechanics and optics. If for a time it appeared otherwise, it was because at velocities which approach that of light the lengths and masses of objects experience in the eyes of the observer an alteration which is imperceptible at familiar speeds. It is in its power of synthesis that Einstein’s mechanics is so splendid. Thanks to it, we perceive more unity, more harmony, more beauty, than formerly in this astounding universe, in which our thoughts and our anxieties are so ephemeral. ”

“ Tragically isolated, imprisoned in his own “self,” man has made a desperate effort to “leap beyond his shadow,” to embrace the external world. From this effort was born science, and its marvellous antennæ subtly prolong our sensations. Thus we have in places approached the brilliant raiment of reality. But in comparison with the mystery that remains the things we know are as small as are the stars of heaven compared with the abyss in which they float.
Einstein has discovered new light for us in the depths of the unknown. He is, and will remain, one of the light-houses of human thought. ”

“ Even if we use the most powerful glasses the stars on the farther side of the sun are completely drowned in its blaze—to speak more correctly, in the light which is diffused by our atmosphere.
To say the truth—if we may venture upon a parenthetic remark at this juncture—night has taught us much more than day about the mysteries of the universe. In literary symbolism, in politics, the light of day is the very symbol of progress and knowledge: night is the symbol of ignorance. ”

“ It is therefore nonsense to speak of a “bankruptcy of science” as contrasted with the certainty which other disciplines may give us respecting the external world. The bankruptcy of one would make all the others bankrupt. When it is not a question of the intimate oasis in which the serene realities of sentiment flourish, but of the arid and imperfectly explored desert of the material world, the scientific facts are the basis of all constructions. ”

“ When we have to plunge into the depths of the unknown to discover something new, when we have to learn more and better, the end justifies the means. When he reminds us of optics, mechanics, and gravitation, now bound up together in a new sheaf, of the deviation of light by gravity which he foretold against all expectation, of the anomalies of Mercury which he was the first to explain, and of his improvement of the Newtonian law, Einstein has the right to say, with some pride: “There is what I have done.” ”

“ Is it possible to admit that nature acts as if it were playing hide-and-seek with us? By what mysterious chance can there be a special circumstance, providentially and exactly compensating for every phenomenon?
Clearly there must be some affinity, some hidden connection, between this mysterious material contraction of Fitzgerald and the lengthening of the light path for which it compensates. We shall see presently how Einstein has illumined the mystery, revealed the mechanism which connects the two phenomena, and thrown a broad and brilliant light upon the whole subject. ”

“ The material world, as Einstein shows it to us, is a sort of masked ball, and, by a deceptive irony, it is we ourselves who have made the black velvet masks and the gay costumes.
Instead of revealing reality to us, space and time are, according to Einstein, only moving veils, woven by ourselves, which hide it from us. ”

“ If the luminous rays behaved in all respects like the shells, as they do in the Michelson experiment, what would be the result? When one advances very rapidly to meet a ray of light, one ought to find its velocity increased relatively to the observer, and lessened if the observer recedes before it. If this were the case, all would be simple; the laws of optics would be the same as those of mechanics; there would be no contradiction to sow discord in the peaceful army of our physicists, and Einstein would have had to spend the resources of his genius on other matters. ”

“ And from all this it also follows, by calculation and by the simple and elegant reasoning of Einstein, of which I here convey only the faintest adumbration, that mass and energy are the same thing, or are at least the two different sides of one and the same coin. There is, then, no longer a material mass. There is nothing but energy in the external universe. A strange—in a sense, an almost spiritual—turn for modern physics to take! ”

“ Every moving body freely left to itself in the universe describes a geodetic.
Far from the massive stars this geodetic is a straight line, because there the universe is almost Euclidean. Near the stars it is a curved line, because there the universe is not Euclidean. A fine conception, combining in a single rule the principle of inertia and the law of gravitation! A brilliant synthesis of mechanics and gravitation, putting an end to the schism which so long kept them separate and non-corresponding sciences! ”

“ What is a velocity? It is the space traversed in the course of a second. But the space thus measured by our moving observer, which he believes to be of a certain length, is in reality, for us who are stationary, smaller than he thinks, because the rules he uses are, as Einstein has shown, shortened by velocity without his perceiving it. Therefore the velocities are not added together in equal proportions and indefinitely for a given observer, as classical mechanics maintained. ”

“ Like some suspension bridge boldly thrown across an abyss, Einstein’s theory rests, on the one side, on experimental phenomena, and it leads, at the other side, to other, and hitherto unsuspected, phenomena, which it has enabled us to discover. ”

“ That is what Einstein calls the “principle of equivalence”: equivalence of the effects of weight and of an accelerated movement. The one cannot be distinguished from the other.
Let us imagine Jules Verne’s projectile and its unfortunate passengers transported a long distance from the moon, the earth, and the sun, to some deserted and glacial region of the Milky Way where there is no matter, and so remote from the stars that there is no longer any weight or attraction. Let us suppose that our projectile is abandoned there, and motionless. ”

“ Bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of their distances. What does that mean? We saw that the mass of a body varies with its velocity. When, for instance, we introduce the mass of our planet into calculations which involve Newton’s law, what precisely do we mean? Do we mean the mass which the earth would have if it did not revolve round the sun? Or do we mean the larger mass which it has in virtue of its motion? This motion, however, is not always of the same speed, because the earth travels in an ellipse, not a circle. ”

“ Clearly one may reply to me that it is not the universe that is adapted to our mind, but the mind that has become adapted to the universe in the evolutionary course of their relations to each other. The mind needs in its evolution to adapt itself to the universe, in conformity with the principle of minimum action formulated by Fermat: perhaps the most profound principle of the physical, biological, and moral world. In that respect the simplest and most economical ideas are the nearest to reality. ”

“ It must, in fine, be clearly understood that the Einsteinian Interval tells us nothing about the absolute, about things in themselves. It, like all others, shows us only relations between things. But the relations which it discloses seem to be real and unvarying. They share the degree of objective truth which classic science attributed, with, perhaps, unfounded assurance, to the chronological and spatial relations of phenomena. In the view of the new physics these were but false scales. The Einsteinian Interval alone shows us what can be known of reality. ”

“ Micromegas would, before he left his planet to visit us, have been able to discover, by optical means, that our globe is shortened by several inches in the direction of its orbital movement; supposing that Voltaire’s genial hero were provided with trigonometrical apparatus infinitely more delicate than that used by our surveyors and astronomers. But when he reached the earth, Micromegas, with all his precise apparatus, would have found it impossible to detect the contraction. He would have been greatly surprised—until he met Einstein and heard, as we shall hear, the explanation of the mystery. ”

“ I believe there are people who can form an idea of four-dimensional space. The successive appearances of a flower in its various phases of growth, from the day when it is but a frail green bud until the time when its exhausted petals fall sadly to the ground, and the successive changes of its corolla under the influence of the wind, give us a globular image of the flower in four-dimensional space. ”

“ Science is the outcome of the search for that mysterious something.
A giant blow has recently been struck, by a man of consummate ability, Albert Einstein, upon this wall which conceals reality from us. A little of the light from beyond now comes to us through the breach he has made, and our eyes are enchanted, almost dazzled, by the rays. ”

“ If it is a weakness of Einstein’s teaching to deny all objectivity, all privilege, to any system of reference whatever, while utilising such a system for the necessities of calculation, it was at all events a weakness shared by the great Poincaré. To the day of his death he rebelled energetically against the Newtonian conception. The support of such a genius, whom one finds involved in all our modern discoveries, is enough to secure some respect for the Relativist theory. ”

“ Indeed, if all the things in the universe were to experience an absolutely irregular spatial deformation—if some invisible and all-powerful spirit were to distort [Pg 26] the universe in any fashion, drawing it out as if it were rubber—we should have no means of knowing the fact. There could be no better proof that space is relative, and that we cannot conceive space apart from the things which we use to measure it. When there is no measuring rod, there is no space. ”

“ Hypotheses usually spring up like mushrooms in every dark corner of science. You get a score of them to explain the slightest obscurity.
This single hypothesis, which seemed to be capable of extricating physicists from the dilemma into which Michelson had put them, was first advanced by the distinguished Irish mathematician Fitzgerald, then taken up and developed by the celebrated Dutch physicist Lorentz, the Poincaré of Holland, one of the most brilliant thinkers of our time. Einstein would no more have attained fame without him than Kepler would without Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. ”

“ All our ideas, all science, and even the whole of our practical life, [Pg 19] are based upon the way in which we picture to ourselves the successive aspects of things. Our mind, with the aid of our senses, chiefly ranges these under the headings of time and space, which thus become the two frames in which we dispose all that is apparent to us of the material world. ”

“ In the first place, one thing is evident, and is unanimously admitted by physicists: in a vacuum, and in a region of space where there is no force acting and no such thing as weight, light travels in a straight line. That is certain for many reasons—in the first place, on the mere ground of symmetry, because in a region of isotropic vacuum a ray which is uninfluenced will not depart from its rectilinear path in any direction whatever. That is evident, whatever hypothesis we adopt as to the nature of light, and even if, like Newton, we suppose that it consists of ponderable particles. ”

“ Astronomy and celestial mechanics derive additional precision and power of forecast from it. We can now follow the golden orbs, on the triumphal wings of calculation, better than we could before, or antedate their movements by centuries.
But there is another test of Einstein’s law of gravitation. If it is sound, the duration of a phenomenon increases, according to Einstein, when the gravitational field becomes more intense. It follows that the duration of the vibration of a given atom must be longer on the sun than on the earth. ”

“ It is the same in nature. The physical continuum which contains, like a vase, all the phenomena of the universe, might have, relatively to me—and as long as I have not observed it—any forms or movements whatever. But as a matter of fact, it is what it is. It cannot be different things at the same time. The drawing-room clock cannot at one and the same time be composed entirely of gold and entirely of silver. ”

“ Is there no means of verifying whether light is or is not bent out of its path by gravitation? There is such a means in astronomy, as we shall now see.
It is impossible to detect the curvature of a luminous ray travelling from one point to another on the earth’s surface, mainly because weight on the earth is too slight to bend the ray much. A further reason is that our planet is so ridiculously small that we cannot follow the light over a sufficient distance. ”

“ In this bold and simple theory gravitation is not a force. The planets have curved paths because near the sun, just as in the neighbourhood of every concentration of matter the universe is curved or warped. The shortest path from one point to another is a line that only seems straight to us—poor pygmies that we are—because we measure it with very small rods and over small distances. ”

“ It is enough to observe that, in regard to time as well as space, it is possible to imagine either a contraction or an enlargement of the scale which would be [Pg 27] completely imperceptible to us; and this seems to show that man cannot conceive an absolute time. If some malicious spirit were to amuse itself some night by making all the phenomena of the universe a thousand times slower, we should not, when we awake, have any means of detecting the change. The world would seem to us unchanged. ”

“ Contrary to all expectation, and to the profound astonishment of physicists, it was found that light travels at precisely the same speed whether the man who receives it is receding before it with the velocity of the earth or is approaching it at the same velocity. It is an undeniable consequence of this that the ether shares the motion of the earth. ”

“ In contrast with the earth’s velocity, the speed of our most rapid means of transport is only a small fraction of a kilometre a second. An aeroplane going at 360 kilometres an hour has a speed of only 100 metres a second. Hence the maximum Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction of our speediest machines can only be such an infinitesimal fraction of an inch that it is entirely imperceptible to us. That is why—that is the only reason why—the solid objects with which we are familiar seem to keep a constant shape, at whatever speed they pass before our eyes. ”