(no subject)
... The learned physicist and the man in the street were standing together on the threshold about to enter a room.
The man in the street moved forward without trouble, planted his foot onto a solid unyielding plank at rest before him, and entered.
The physicist was faced with an intricate problem. To make any movement he must shove against the atmosphere, which presses with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of his body. He must land on a plank travelling at twenty miles and second round the sun -- a fraction of a second earlier or later the plank would be miles away from the chosen spot. He must do this whilst hanging from a round planet heading outward into space, and with a wind of ether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of his body. He reflects too that the plank is mostly emptiness; charges dashing about at great speeds but occupying at any moment less than a billionth part of the volume which the plank seems to fill continuously. It is like stepping on a swarm of flies...
Happily even a learned physicist has usuallysome sense of proportion; and it is probable that for this occadion he put out of mind scientific truths about astronomical motions, the constitution of planks and the laws or probability, and was content to follow the same crude conception of his task that presented itself to the mind of his unscientific colleague.
The man in the street moved forward without trouble, planted his foot onto a solid unyielding plank at rest before him, and entered.
The physicist was faced with an intricate problem. To make any movement he must shove against the atmosphere, which presses with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of his body. He must land on a plank travelling at twenty miles and second round the sun -- a fraction of a second earlier or later the plank would be miles away from the chosen spot. He must do this whilst hanging from a round planet heading outward into space, and with a wind of ether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of his body. He reflects too that the plank is mostly emptiness; charges dashing about at great speeds but occupying at any moment less than a billionth part of the volume which the plank seems to fill continuously. It is like stepping on a swarm of flies...
Happily even a learned physicist has usuallysome sense of proportion; and it is probable that for this occadion he put out of mind scientific truths about astronomical motions, the constitution of planks and the laws or probability, and was content to follow the same crude conception of his task that presented itself to the mind of his unscientific colleague.