Lumen

by Camille Flammarion

Ah well! I recently visited a world belonging to one of the most luminous regions of the Milky Way, where an intellectual order absolutely different exists; where the constitution of the Government is such, that only those distinguished for their virtues are placed at the head of the State; and their function is to seek out, and place in responsible positions, men worthy of the trust.

In that country, in short, the search is as eager for the discovery of merit and intelligence, as it is in yours for gold and diamonds. All is done there for the benefit of humanity. They have not invented any Academy, as they cannot conceive that a man of worth (instead of being sought after) should be compelled to waste his time in visits of ceremony, and find, probably, that a titled nobody (who has known better than he how to cajole votes) has been preferred to himself. So true it is, that the system prevailing in other worlds is far more enlightened than that of yours.

The magnifying power of time.

Now, my dear terrestrial friend, you know what the Earth is in the universe; you know something of what the heavens contain; and you know also what Life is, and what Death is. We shall soon see the dawn of morning, which puts spirits to flight and brings our conversations to an end, as the approach of your terrestrial day causes the brightness of Venus to fade away. But I should like to add to the preceding ideas a very interesting remark suggested by the same observations. It is this: If you set out from the Earth at the moment that a flash of lightning bursts forth, and if you travelled for an hour or more with the light, you would see the lightning as long as you continued to look at it. This fact is established by the foregoing principles. But if, instead of travelling exactly with the velocity of light, you were to travel with a little less velocity; note the observation that you might make: I will suppose that this voyage away from the Earth, during which you look at the lightning, lasts a minute. I will suppose also, that the lightning lasts a thousandth part of a second. You will continue to see the lightning during 60,000 times its duration. In our first supposition this voyage is identical with that of light. Light has occupied 60,000 tenths of seconds to go from the Earth to the point in space where you are. Your voyage and that of light have co-existed. Now if instead of flying with just the same velocity as light, you had flown a little less quickly, and if you had employed a thousandth part of a second more to arrive at the same point, instead of always seeing the same moment of the lightning, you would have seen, successively, the different moments which constituted the total duration of the lightning, equal to 1000 parts of a second. In this whole minute you would have had time to see first the beginning of the flash of lightning, and could analyse the development of it, the successive phases of it, to the very end. You may imagine what strange discoveries one could make in the secret nature of lightning, increased 60,000 times in the order of its duration, what frightful battles you would have time to discover in the flames! what pandemonium! what unlucky atoms! what a world hidden by its volatile nature from the imperfect eyes of mortals!

Vision of the analysing eye.

If you could see by your imagination sufficiently, to separate and count the atoms which constitute the body of a man, that body would disappear before you, for it consists of thousands of millions of atoms in motion, and to the analysing eye it would be a nebula animated by the forces of gravitation. Did not Swedenborg imagine that the universe by which he was surrounded, seen as a whole, was in the form of an immense man? That was anthropomorphism. But there are analogies everywhere. What we know most certainly is, that things are not what they appear to be, either in space or in time. But let us return to the delayed flash of lightning.

When you travel with the velocity of light, you see constantly the scene which was in existence at the moment of your departure. If you were carried away for a year, at the same rate, you would have before your eyes the same event for that time. But if, in order to see more distinctly an event which would have taken only a few seconds, such as the fall of a mountain, an avalanche, or an earthquake, you were to delay, to see the commencement of the catastrophe (in slackening a little, your steps on those of light), you would see the progress of the catastrophe, its first moment, its second, and so on successively, in thus nearly following the light, you would only see the end after an hour of observation. The event would last for you an hour instead of a few seconds. You would see the rocks, or the stones suspended in the air, and could thus ascertain the mode of production of the phenomenon, and its incidental delays. Already your terrestrial scientific knowledge enables you to take instantaneous photographs of the successive aspects of rapid phenomena, such as lightning, a meteor, the waves of the sea, a volcanic eruption, the fall of a building, and to make them pass before you graduated in accordance with their effect on the retina. Similarly you can, on the contrary, photograph the pollen of a flower, through each stage of expansion to its completion in the fruit, or the development of a child from its birth to maturity, and project these phases upon a screen, depicting in a few seconds the life of a man, or a tree.

A chrono-telescope.

I see in your thoughts that you compare this effect to that of a microscope which would magnify time. That is exactly what it is; we thus see time amplified. This process cannot strictly speaking be called that of the microscope, but rather that of a chronoscope or of a chrono-telescope (to see time from afar). The duration of a reign might, by the same process, be augmented according to the good pleasure of the parti politique.