In Words of Four Letters or Less

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[ 0 ]

So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get
you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It’s hard to just dive
in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up
and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only
to see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I’m off
to the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear
with me, and we’ll get to the end in good time. Okay?

Okay. Let’s see….

[ I ]

Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone.
It’s all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay,
yes, it’s a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know
if you move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say,
list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find
out? Hell no. You can see that, sure. You don’t need me to tell
you. To move, you have to move to or away from … well, from
what? You’d have to say that you don’t even get to use a word like
“move” when you are the only body in that void. Sure. Okay.

Now, let’s add the bed back. Your bed is with you in the void. But not
for long — it goes away from you. You don’t have any way to get it
back, so you just let it go. But so now we have a body in the void
with you. So does the bed move, or do you move? Or both? Well, you can
see as well as I that it can go any way you like. Flip a coin. Who’s
to say? It’s best to just say that you move away from the bed, and
that the bed goes away from you. No one can say who’s held fast and
who isn’t.

Now, if I took the bed back but gave you the sun — just you and the
sun in the void, now — I’ll bet you’d say that the sun is so big,
next to you, that odds are you move and not the sun. It’s easy to move
a body like ours, and not so easy to kick a sun to and fro. But that
isn’t the way to see it. Just like with the bed, no one can say who’s
held fast.

In a word, you can’t find any one true “at rest”. Izzy was the one who
told us that. Izzy said that you can’t tell if you move or are at rest
at any time. You can say that you go and all else is at rest, or you
can say that you are at rest and all else goes. It all adds up the
same both ways. So we all knew that much from way back when.

Aha, but now wait! The sun puts off rays! So: why not look at how fast
the rays go past you? From that you’d see how fast you move, yes? For
you see, rays move just the same if what puts them off is held fast or
not. (Make a note of that, now.) Izzy had no way to know that, back
then, but it’s true. Rays all move the same. We call how fast that is:
c. So, you can see how fast the rays go by you, and how far off that
is from c will tell you how fast you move! Hell, you don’t even need
the sun for that. You can just have a lamp with you — the one by your
bed that you use to read by. You can have that lamp in your hand, and
see how fast the rays go by you when you turn it on. The lamp will
move with you, but the rays will move at c. You will see the rays
move a bit more or less than c, and that will be how fast you move.
An open-and-shut case, yes?

Well, and so we went to test this idea out. Hey, you don’t need to be
in a void to do this test. We move all the time, even as we sit here.
We spin, in fact. So they shot some rays off and took note of how fast
they went east, and how fast they went west, and so on. Well, what do
you know? The rays went just as fast both ways. All ways, in fact.
They all went at c, just the same. Not an iota more or less.

To say that we were less than glad to find that out is to be kind. It
blew the mind, is more like it. “What is up with that?” we said. And
here is when old Al came in.

[ II ]

Old Al, he came out the blue and said, “Not only do rays move at c
if what puts them out is held fast or not: they move at c even if
you are held fast or not.” Now that may not look like such a big
deal on the face of it, but hold on. What this says is that you can
move as fast or as slow as you want, and rays will go by you at c
all the time. You can have a pal run past you and when you both look
at a ray go by at the same time, you will both see the same ray go
by at c! That is a bit wild, no? You, back in that void, you just
can not say if you move or not — with the lamp or no. Not that you
can’t tell: it can’t be said. It’s moot!

But for that to be true, then time also has to get in on the
act. For you and your pal to see the same ray go by at the same clip,
her idea of time must be off from your idea of time!

I can hear you say, “No way. That can’t be!” But I tell you it
is. Old Al said so. He said, here, I’ll show you. Get a load of
this. We have Bert and Dana. Take a bus, and put Bert on the bus. The
bus goes down the road. Dana, she sits here, on the side of the
road. He’s in the bus and she’s on her ass. And now take a rock off of
the moon, and let it fall at them. It hits the air and cuts in
two. The two bits burn, and then land just as Bert and Dana are side
by side. One hits the dirt up the road a ways, and one hits down the
road a ways. Dana sees each rock at the same time, but Bert sees one
rock and then see