Page:Wonder Stories Quarterly Volume 2 Number 2 (Winter 1931).djvu/7



N a recent statement. Sir James H. Jeans was quoted as saying, in view of the fact that certain stars are apparently receding from us at the rate of 26,000,000 miles an hour, in his opinion, such incredible speed could only be accounted for by the fact that we are in the midst of an exploding universe.

Here indeed is food for thought and, if we ponder the statement by one of the foremost scientists in the world, we immediately begin to see the tremendous import of the idea.

Everything in this world is relative. A microbe is born, lives and ripens to old age in the space of a few minutes. To it naturally, this space of time is as great as the span of a human being who lives from seventy to eighty years. Benjamin Franklin once wrote a very interesting essay on the ephemera, a fly, which, lives but a single day yet, during that time, it no doubt experiences the counterpart of our own full lives.

The conception of time, therefore, we must recognize being as relative as the outer things in our material world. The thought has often been advanced that the universe in which we are living is simply another sub-universe, merely on a larger scale. We are perhaps a world within a greater world, too great for, our senses to comprehend and everything being relative—with time relative too,—there would seem, to be, no good reason why indeed our universe is not simply some microscopic world, enlarged to us on a tremendous scale.

Take a stick of dynamite and explode it. To our senses, the explosion is completed instantaneously; since the whole process has involved but a small fraction of a second. Yet, even in the comparatively crude stage of development which photography has reached today we can take motion pictures of this explosion, and throw them slowly on the screen; thereby apparently lengthening the time from a fraction of a second into minutes. Later on, with better machinery, it will be possible to expand the time element from a fraction of a second to hours. We can even conceive that, a hundred years from now, by some superior motion-picture device, it will be possible to photograph particles of exploding dynamite so that they will appear at rest; and, finally, the individual atoms might be shown shaken by the explosion. Thus it might take hours to repeat the events that took but a fraction of a second originally.

This is precisely what Sir James Jeans means when he says we are living in a veritable explosion.

Reckoned in the scale of human measurements, our universe may have an age not much greater than a few billion billion years. Although this is staggering to oyr time conception, it may be only a fraction of a second in some other time equivalent, where events are reckoned on a different and vastly larger scale of time values. In the meantime, the explosion of our own universe is going on at a terrific rate and in a fraction of a second—in some other super-time equivalent—the explosion will be over and our universe scattered. Yet to us in our apparently slow time equivalent, the explosion may go on for several more billion billion years. A daring idea, and indeed stranger than the most bizarre thoughts of any science fiction Writer.