Farley looked at her sharply.
"You mean something in your subconscious?" Phil asked.
"Perhaps that's what it is, and yet they say that you try to escape knowledge of your subconscious—that it frightens you. I am not frightened, Phil. I feel ... expectant."
"I'd feel more expectant," he said, "if I were quite sure of what I was doing. The trouble is that while ordinary light could in theory show you the super-astronomy of the stars and planets that are made up of atoms consisting of our stars and planets, it won't work the other way."
"Why not?" Farley wanted to know.
"Wave length. As it is, we have to use an electron microscope to see the larger molecules; the wave length of visible light is too coarse-grained to show anything that small. So just try to imagine how impossible it would be to see the sub-atoms—infra-atoms—that I'm talking about if one had to rely on ordinary light! The electron microscope wouldn't help, either. It would be exactly as though some gigantic, super-researcher were trying to look at one of our molecules by bombarding it with a shower of planets."
"Then how can you see this 'red shift'?" Katherine asked.
"I can't," he said. "I detect it by a kind of mathematical diagnosis. It's an inferential process—as most forms of observation are, in modern physics."
Farley was looking as intelligent as he possibly could, but it was plain that he was out of his depth. He had heard of the red shift, but he decided he had better not have it explained.
"There's another thing," Phil said. "The time it would take light to make the round trip of our Einsteinian finite universe would be so great—in the order of 4π x 108 years—that not only would you not see your not-yet born self, but the Earth wouldn't have been formed either. The light you saw would be that many years out of date. However, in this case the elapsed time would be hyper-time, and you'd be there in ordinary time."