Felipe Alfau - Chromos

In the light of our concept, we have a type of infinity to which something can be added and from which something can be subtracted, contrary to the relativistic viewpoint The fundamental concepts are the same, but the conclusions are very different These conclusions appear in both cases as paradoxical, but while in one system they become understandable, in the other they defy reason.

I should have known better, but I allowed myself to be dragged into the discussion. Not being at all sure of my ground, I tried to advance behind a shield of generalizations and demagogy. This was, I said, being iconoclastic and unfair to the great men of science — and the world does not applaud or sanction people for nothing — who had achieved such remarkable conclusions and contributed so many things to our modern world. I did not go into what conclusions or what things, because even if I did not know them well, I felt certain that I must be speaking the truth, but the Moor turned the tables on me and said that I had chosen the wrong word when I said “iconoclastic” because modern science was certainly a specialist at laying low idols and old tried and respected truths. He was sponsoring the movement of back to neo-Euclidianism and the tautological neo-Newtonism and I think I caught something of his perennial phrase “don’t know what it’s all about.”

I contented myself with saying that even a dumb clock is right once every twelve hours, but he looked at me with the eyes of a hypnotizing fakir and emitted in a stage whisper:

“Right every moment while stretched out, taking a nap, on the fourth perpendicular, but don’t tell anybody.” He held his pose pointing his fingers at me and then went: “Boo!”

This time I gave up.

He pursued his line of reasoning as if there had been no interruption and, temporizing with Dr. de los Rios, who had argued some of his implications, he conceded that perhaps modern science is only endeavoring to avoid boredom at the repetition of the same old postulates and redundant formulas, perhaps scared by a frightful suggestion of futility once tossed off by Poincare, by creating a novel mental game whose price lies outside an imaginary vicious circle and befuddles the main issue with the razzle-dazzle of surprising apparent contradictions: “To take the decisive step, to lift the frame of the little machine, would be exhibiting paradisiac innocence. The oversimplification would be intolerable — anybody could understand it. No more inner sanctum or chosen few.”

I was still slightly irritated at him and both revenge and prudence dictated to ignore the conversation. I read the notes instead:

. with the decisive step, all these things could be expressed in terms of a time including classical relativity, elementary geometry and reciprocally equivalent Galilei transformations, without resorting to any devious calibration curves, principles of indeterminacy and all the usual rigamarole. Newtonian mechanics remain valid. As an example, the square of the radius is implied in anything isotropic, such as gravitation and also time, but the fact that accelerations like that produced by gravitation involve time as a function, that scientists have been squaring time as the most natural thing in the world, constitutes a tacit acceptance of the validity of this theory and makes it self-evident.

All problems and phenomena which appear incapable of explanation or understanding because we insist on considering them as isolated and disconnected become simple in a universe which is connected and immobile and they resolve into the shape of things, the pattern. Problems of action at a distance evaporate because the universe is one, continuous, solid, rigid, and there is no action. Force and acceleration reduce to the difference between sets of coordinates. Laws of physics become platitudinous to the point of idiocy when thus stated. The laws of motion appear self-evident; the first law is tantamount to saying that a line is straight until it bends; the second law, that the rate of separation between a certain curve and any of its tangents increases as both are produced; the third law is equivalent to the division of an angle by the fourth perpendicular.

It all boils down to the statement of a structure in which the words “fourth coordinate” and the deviations from it are substituted for the words “time and motion.” The result is the same, but the intuitive implications of the words commonly used only succeed in rendering the concept more confused and elusive.

I was going to address a remark to the Moor, my irritation having left me during my efforts to concentrate amidst the conversation and music around me, but he was deep in the subject of music, praising the orchestral grand stunts of Strauss and maintaining that his Till Eulenspiegel was the most remarkable production of modern times. This led to further discussions of fine points of what one might mean by “modern” and the beginning of an epoch, and he and de los Rios discussed new harmonics and acoustic effects and their validity. He soon linked these things to the same desire to escape the boredom of repetition and accused Beethoven of being as exhaustive as Newton and therefore leaving little if anything for others to do along fundamental lines. The manner in which he jumped from one thing to another was extraordinary and I don’t know how de los Rios managed to keep pace with him so easily.

He had been playing the weird number four of the Kreisleriana and now played number six. It held us spellbound with its unearthly beauty which became even sadder in the unexpected dance tempo, and then he began to discuss Schumann’s artificial fingering and systems of inducing cramped positions of the hands in order to bring out a particular voice, and he played some more of his things as an illustration. It was all highly technical, so I read some more — from the pan into the fire:

. they refuse to take the plunge. They who have assumed so many things, who accepted ether so tenuous that everything could move through it without resistance, yet was so rigid as to propagate things at unheard-of speeds; they who accepted so many contradictory hypotheses and maddening conclusions, who have carried open-mindedness to the point where there is nothing more to open, refuse to take the decisive, final plunge, refuse to lift the frame of the little machine. Anything but that. And yet, that would explain so many things, as Lagrange said of the hypothesis of a Creator, except that here the problem would be dissolved, rather than solved. The contradictions of the ether disappear. It can be the most rigid thing imaginable and at the same time offer no resistance to motion, because there is nothing to resist, there is no motion.

I put a question to him which I thought would go unheeded, but he caught it:

“Of course, the darn thing is as rigid as can be — dead and stiff, that’s it. The universe is dead but one cannot admit that fact. The Olympian optimism. In decent, cultured, well-to-do society, it is not proper to speak of death, one avoids this word and the verb ‘to die’ as almost obscene. Nice people only refer to this fact as ‘passing on,’ or ‘away.’ Nice people never die. One can die only on the wrong side of town and a man must cross the tracks before he can die simply, in peace. Anything else would be a misdemeanor. Mind you, people may be dying everywhere like flies, but this is considered bad taste. Never mind if people are decimated, the thing is inadmissible, one must be optimistic and suggest other possibilities. One cannot come out and say that someone died, or that something is dead. It is shocking, revolting — and yet the universe is not passing on or away as many well-bred scientists have insisted, because there is no motion and despite our scruples, nothing is passing. The universe has been, or is, dead all its life, to speak like Berlios.”