Thus velocity (velocity relatively to the things observed, we must always remember) acts in a sense as a double brake lessening durations and shortening lengths. If a different illustration be preferred, velocity enables us to see both spaces and times more obliquely, at an increasingly sharp angle. Space and time are therefore only changing effects of perspective.
Can we conceive space of four dimensions? That is to say, can we imagine or visualise it? Even if we cannot, it proves nothing as regards the reality of such space. During ages no one conceived such a thing as the Hertzian waves, and even to-day we have no direct sense-impression of them. They exist none the less. As a matter of fact, we find it difficult to conceive space of three dimensions. If it were not for our muscular changes, we should know nothing about it. A paralysed and one-eyed man, that is to say, a man without the sensation of relief which we get from binocular vision—and even this is, in the first place, a muscular sensation—would, with his single eye, see all objects on the same plane, as on the drop-scene of a theatre. He could have no perception of three-dimensional space.
I believe there are people who can form an idea of four-dimensional space. The successive appearances of a flower in its various phases of growth, from the day when it is but a frail green bud until the time when its exhausted petals fall sadly to the ground, and the successive changes of its corolla under the influence of the wind, give us a globular image of the flower in four-dimensional space.
Are there any who can see all this together? I believe that there are, especially amongst good chess-players. When a skilful player plays well, it is because he can take in with a single glance of his mental eye the whole chronological and spatial series of moves that may follow the first move, with all their effects on the board. He sees the whole series simultaneously.
The words I have italicised look contradictory. That is because we are in a province where it is all but impossible to express the fine shades of things in words. One might just as well attempt to define verbally all that there is in a symphony of Beethoven. “The translator is a traitor.” If there is any truth in the proverb, it is because words are the organ of translation.
We have reached a point in our gradual progress into Relativist physics where we have before our eyes merely a battlefield strewn with corpses and ruins.
We had regarded time and space as hooks solidly fastened to the wall behind which lurks reality, and on these we hang our floating ideas of the material world, just as we hang our coats on the rack. Now they lie, torn down and crumpled, amongst the rubbish of ancient theories, victims of the hammer-blows of the new physics.
We knew quite well, of course, that the souls of men were inscrutable to us, but we did think that we saw their faces. Now, as we approach them, we find that it is only masks we saw. The material world, as Einstein shows it to us, is a sort of masked ball, and, by a deceptive irony, it is we ourselves who have made the black velvet masks and the gay costumes.
Instead of revealing reality to us, space and time are, according to Einstein, only moving veils, woven by ourselves, which hide it from us. Yet—strange and melancholy reflection—we can no more conceive the world without space and time than we can observe certain microbes under the microscope without first injecting colouring matter into them.