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vol. title: Miscellaneous Scraps from January 1st 1878 vol. period: 1875-1878 pages in vol.: 153 |
Rise of the Dish-Germ
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Col. Ingersoll`s Lecture
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Two Great Inventions
Nothing of modern invention has proved so extraordinary an illustration of the subjective character of space-and-time distant as the two kinds of telephones—the telephone which enables a man to speak at one point and be heard at another, hundreds of miles distant, and the still more curious telephone which enables a man to speak at one point of time and be heard when not only his name, but even his nation, it may be, is forgotten. Some thirty years ago or more a very curious little book was published entitled "The Stars and the Earth," in which it was shown how, if an eye could be imagined riding on a ray of light reflected from an opening flower and passing on it through endless space and time, such an eye would always see that flower as it was in the same momentary phase of opening in which it appeared at the time that ray was first reflected from it, and would so see it to all eternity, whereas if it travelled the least bit faster, so as to overtake—say, in 1,000 years—the ray which left the flower a minute sooner, that eye would be reading backward the change which we see accomplished in a minute, but would have it sub-divided over the period of 1,000 years. In the same way, if an eye could be imagined travelling in the direction of the same ray of light, but rather slower, so as to fall behind it a minute in 1,000 years, then it would see the next minute instead of the previous minute of that opening blossom's history stretched out to the length of 1,000 years. All this was intended to illustrate the extremely subjective character of the nature of time, and to prove that it only requires us to imagine a different relation between our eye and the light reflected from any object, to make a thousand years appear as one day and one day as a thousand years. <... continues on page 5-40 >
Editor's notes