"The really important factor is ultimately intuition," Einstein had said to me. It made me think of Huyghens' remark about the genius who would have been able to create the telescope without the help of chance. Was not this intellect, imagined by Huyghens, sitting opposite me at that moment? An inner voice answered in the affirmative, for Einstein's thought-complex seemed to me at that moment a kind of telescope for the human mind, a telescope that had arisen out of pure intuition, and whose range stretched to the limits of the universe.
CHAPTER VI
OF DIFFERENT WORLDS
Imaginary Experiment with "Lumen."—Impossibilities.—A Destroyed Illusion.—Is the World Infinite?—Surface Creatures and Shadow Rambles.—What is the Beyond?—Action at a Distance.—Ideas of Multi-dimensional Regions.—Hypnotism.—Recollections of Zöllner.—Science and Dogma.—The Trial of Galilei.
CONVERSATION held during April 1920 destroyed an illusion which had become dear to me.
It concerned the fantastic figure, "Lumen," conceived as an actual human being, imagined as endowed with an extraordinary power of motion and keenness of sight. Mr. Lumen is supposed to be the invention of the astronomer Flammarion, who produced him in the retort of fancy, as Faust produced Homunculus, to use him to prove the possibility of very remarkable happenings, in particular, the reversal of Time.
Einstein declared outright: "Firstly, Lumen is not due to Flammarion, who has derived him from other sources; and secondly. Lumen can in no way be used as a means of proving things."
MOSZKOWSKI: "It is at least very interesting to operate with him. Lumen is supposed to have a velocity greater than that of light. Let us assume this as given, then the rest follows quite logically. If, for example, he leaves the earth on the day of a great event, such as the battle of Waterloo, and—— May I trace out this example, at the risk of tiring you?"
EINSTEIN: Do repeat it, and act as if you were telling something entirely new. It is clear that the Lumen-story gives you great amusement, so please talk quite freely. But I cannot forgo the privilege of showing later how the whole adventure and its consequences must be demolished.
M.: Well then, the person, Lumen, sets off at the end of the battle of Waterloo to make an excursion into space with a speed of 250,000 miles per second. He thus catches up all the light-rays that left the field of battle and moved in his direction. After an hour he will already have attained a lead of about twenty minutes. This lead will be gradually increased, so that at the end of the second day he will no longer be seeing the end of the battle, but the beginning. What has Lumen been seeing in the meantime? Clearly he has been observing events happening in the reverse direction, as in the case of a cinematograph which is exhibiting pictures backwards. He saw the projectiles leaving the objects they had struck, and returning into the mouths of the cannon. He saw the dead come to life, arise, and arrange themselves into battalion order. He would thus arrive at an exactly opposite view of the passing of time, for what he observes is as much his experience as what we observe is ours. If he had seen all the battles of history and, in fact, all events happening in the reverse order, then in his mind "before" and "after" would be interchanged. That is, he would experience time backwards; what are causes to us would be effects to him, and our effects would be his causes; antecedents and consequents would change places, and he would arrive at a causality diametrically opposite to our own. He would be quite as justified in adopting his view of the happening of things, according to his experiences, and of the causal nexus as it appears to him, as we are justified in adopting ours.
EINSTEIN: And the whole story is mere humbug, absurd, and based on false premises, leading to entirely false conclusions.