NEW CONCEPTS OF TIME AND SPACE
EINSTEIN, the author of the Theory of Relativity, is said to have declared that there were only twelve men in the world capable of understanding it. This may perhaps be true in relation to its purely mathematical aspects, but certain correlative ideas any one should be able to understand, after a fashion, and it is a profitable and delightful exercise of the imagination to follow where they lead.
The chief of these ideas—which is as old as philosophy itself—is that all our knowledge is relative, conditioned by our receptivity—"the perception of a perceiver"—and that by the so-called scientific method we can never know things-in-themselves.
The reason for this is plain: we are altogether too conditioned, too "immersed." While endeavouring to discover the changes which take place in the world round about us, we are ourselves affected by those very changes which form the object of our quest. We cannot correctly sense or accurately measure phenomena, because our senses and our measuring instruments are affected in a manner and to an extent it is impossible for us to find out.
For example, if at a given moment of time the universe, our world, and we ourselves should shrink to half their present size, and time (as would be the case) should accelerate correspondingly, we should be quite unconscious of any change, and should regard as a madman any one who tried to tell us what had happened. And this shrinkage could go on repeating itself in geometrical progression until a man became a midge, with a life no longer than an upward-flying spark's; and still, like Hamlet, could he count himself a king of infinite space, and unlike Hamlet, never know that the "times" were out of joint.
If space curves, swells, shrinks; if time lags or hastens, we do not know it, nor the extent of it. These ideas, implicit in the Theory of Relativity, that space and time are not so immutable as they appear, that everything may suffer distortion, that time may run swift or slow without our being in the least aware, can be made interestingly
