After dinner on their first evening in the Beach Hotel with the old professor talking about cosmology, and his daughter chatting about art, Mr Tompkins finally got to his room, collapsed on to the bed, and pulled the blanket over his head. Botticelli and Bondi, Salvador Dali and Fred Hoyle, Lemaitre and La Fontaine got all mixed up in his tired brain, and finally he fell into a deep sleep...
Sometime in the middle of the night he woke up with a strange feeling that instead of lying on a comfortable spring mattress he was lying on something hard. He opened his eyes and found himself prostrated on what he first thought to be a big rock on the seashore.
Later he discovered that it was actually a very big rock, about 30 feet in diameter, suspended in space without any visible support. The rock was covered with some green moss, and in a few places little bushes were growing from cracks in the stone. The space around the rock was illuminated by some glimmering light and was very dusty. In fact, there was more dust in the air than he had ever seen, even in the films representing dust storms in the Middle West. He tied his handkerchief round his nose and felt, after this, considerably relieved. But there were more dangerous things than the dust in the surrounding space. Very often stones of the size of his head and larger were swirling through the space near his rock, occasionally hitting it with a strange dull sound of impact. He noticed also one or two rocks of approximately the same size as his own, floating through space at some distance away. All this time, inspecting his surroundings, he was clinging hard to some protruding edges of his rock in constant fear of falling off and being lost in the dusty depths below. Soon, however, he became bolder, and made an attempt to crawl to the edge of his rock and to see whether there was really nothing underneath, supporting it. As he was crawling in this way, he noticed, to his great surprise, that he did not fall off, but that his weight was constantly pressing him to the surface of the rock, although he had covered already more than a quarter of its circumference. Looking from behind a ridge of loose stones on the spot just underneath the place where he originally found himself, he discovered nothing to support the rock in space. To his great surprise, however, the glimmering light revealed the tall figure of his friend the old professor standing apparently with his head down and making some notes in his pocket-book.
Now Mr Tompkins began slowly to understand. He remembered that he was taught in his schooldays that the earth is a big round rock moving freely in space around the sun. He also remembered the picture of two antipodes standing on the opposite sides of the earth. Yes, his rock was just a very small stellar body attracting everything to its surface, and he and the old professor were the only population of this little planet. This consoled him a little; there was at least no danger of falling off!
‘Good morning,’ said Mr Tompkins, to divert the old man’s attention from his calculations.
The professor raised his eyes from his note-book.’ There are no mornings here,’ he said, ‘there is no sun and not a single luminous star in this universe. It is lucky that the bodies here show some chemical process on their surface, otherwise I should not be able to observe the expansion of this space’, and he returned again to his note-book.
Mr Tompkins felt quite unhappy; to meet the only living person in the whole universe, and to find him so unsociable! Unexpectedly, one of the little meteorites came to his help; with a crashing sound the stone hit the book in the hands of the professor and threw it, travelling fast through space, away from their little planet.
‘Now you will never see it again,’ said Mr Tompkins, as the book got smaller and smaller, flying through space.
‘On the contrary,’ replied the professor. ‘You see, the space in which we now are is not infinite in its extension. Oh yes, yes, I know that you have been taught in school that space is infinite, and that two parallel lines never meet. This, however, is not true either for the space in which the rest of humanity lives, or for the space in which we are now. The first one is of course very large indeed; the scientists estimated its present dimensions to be about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, which, for an ordinary mind, is fairly infinite. If I had lost my book there, it would take an incredibly long time to come back. Here, however, the situation is rather different. Just before the note-book was torn out of my hands, I had figured out that this space is only about five miles in diameter, though it is rapidly expanding. I expect the book back in not more than half an hour.’
‘But,’ ventured Mr Tompkins, ‘do you mean that your book is going to behave like the boomerang of an Australian native, and, by moving along a curved trajectory, fall down at your feet?’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ answered the professor. ‘If you want to understand what really happens, think about an ancient Greek who did not know that the earth was a sphere. Suppose he has given somebody instructions to go always straight northwards. Imagine his astonishment when his runner finally returns to him from the south. Our ancient Greek did not have a notion about travelling round the world (round the earth, I mean in this case), and he would be sure that his runner had lost his way and had taken a curved route which brought him back. In reality his man was going all the time along the straightest line one can draw on the surface of the earth, but he travelled round the world and thus came back from the opposite direction. The same thing is going to happen to my book, unless it is hit on its way by some other stone and thus deflected from the straight track. Here, take these binoculars, and see if you can still see it.’
Mr Tompkins put the binoculars to his eyes, and, through the dust which somewhat obscured the whole picture, he managed to see the professor’s note-book travelling through space far-far away. He was somewhat surprised by the pink colouring of all the objects, including the book, at that distance.
‘But,’ he exclaimed after a while, ‘your book is returning, I see it growing larger.’
‘No,’ said the professor, ‘it is still going away. The fact that you see it growing in size, as if it were coming back, is due to a peculiar focusing effect of the closed spherical space on the rays of light. Let us return to our ancient Greek. If the rays of light could be kept going all the time along the curved surface of the earth, let us say by refraction of the atmosphere, he would be able, using powerful binoculars, to see his runner all the time during the journey. If you look on the globe, you will see that the straightest lines on its surface, the meridians, first diverge from one pole, but, after passing the equator, begin to converge towards the opposite pole. If the rays of light travelled along the meridians, you, located, for example, at one pole, would see the person going away from you growing smaller and smaller only until he crossed the equator. After this point you would see him growing larger and it would seem to you that he was returning, going, however, backwards. After he had reached the opposite pole, you would see him as large as if he were standing right by your side. You would not be able, however, to touch him, just as you cannot touch the image in a spherical mirror. On this basis of two-dimensional analogy, you can imagine what happens to the light rays in the strangely curved three-dimensional space. Here, I think the image of the book is quite close now.’ In fact, dropping the binoculars, Mr Tompkins could see that the book was only a few yards away. It looked, however, very strange indeed! The contours were not sharp, but rather washed out, the formulae written by the professor on its pages could be hardly recognized, and the whole book looked like a photograph taken out of focus and underdeveloped.
‘You see now,’ said the professor,’ that this is only the image of the book, badly distorted by light travelling across one half of the universe. If you want to be quite sure of it, just notice how the stones behind the book can be seen through its pages.’
Mr Tompkins tried to reach the book, but his hand passed through the image without any resistance.
‘The book itself,’ said the professor, ‘is now very close to the opposite pole of the universe, and what you see here are just two images of it. The second image is just behind you and when both images coincide, the real book will be exactly at the opposite pole.’ Mr Tompkins didn’t hear; he was too deeply absorbed in his thoughts, trying to remember how the images of objects are formed in elementary optics by concave mirrors and lenses. When he finally gave it up, the two images were again receding in opposite directions.
‘But what makes the space curved and produce all these funny effects?’ he asked the professor.
‘The presence of ponderable matter,’ was the answer. ‘When Newton discovered the law of gravity, he thought that gravity was just an ordinary force, the same type offeree as, for example, is produced by an elastic string stretched between two bodies. There always remains, however, the mysterious fact that all bodies, independent of their weight and size, have the same acceleration and move the same way under the action of gravity, provided you eliminate the friction of air and that sort of thing, of course. It was Einstein who first made it clear that the primary action of ponderable matter is to produce the curvature of space and that the trajectories of all bodies moving in the field of gravity are curved just because space itself is curved. But I think it is too hard for you to understand, without knowing sufficient mathematics.’
‘It is,’ said Mr Tompkins. ‘But tell me, if there were no matter, would we have the kind of geometry I was taught at school, and would parallel lines never meet?’
‘They would not,’ answered the professor, ‘but neither would there be any material creature to check it.’
‘Well, perhaps Euclid never existed, and therefore could construct the geometry of absolutely empty space?’
But the professor apparently did not like to enter into this metaphysical discussion.
In the meantime the image of the book went off again far away in the original direction, and started coming back for the second time. Now it was still more damaged than before, and could hardly be recognized at all, which, according to the professor, was due to the fact that the light rays had travelled this time round the whole universe.
‘If you turn your head once more,’ he said to Mr Tompkins, ‘you will see my book finally coming back after completing its journey round the world.’ He stretched his hand, caught the book, and pushed it into his pocket.
This is just an extract from George Gamov's "mr.Tompkins", that i wanted to share.
thank you for reading ^_^
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