For one thing they told us that the velocity of light was not a constant. As a matter of fact they seemed to be rather pointed in their statements that light doesn’t travel, it is. And we told them that from our point of view it appeared to travel with a certain definite velocity of 186,000 miles per second. They said that’s the way it looks to you because you are looking at it from a region having certain conditions, certain influences, but they said if you were to go away from this region you would find that a different set of circumstances prevailed. Another thing they told us cast a great deal of doubt on our ideas of time. They told us that time wasn’t at all what we thought it was, namely what might be marked off with the ticking of a clock, that time was, in fact, a field function, the result of there being a universe. That is, something which was derived from the basic primordial concepts which brought this universe into being, and that it differed as you went from one part of the universe to the other. Also it could be altered, sometimes by natural means, sometimes by intelligently-controlled means in various parts of the universe. So that in any given interval, which incidentally is what our clocks mark off, our intervals, not chunks of time, in these intervals we can have all sorts of lengths of time. In other words if one of you checks your clock with me and finds that they are synchronised and I climb into a flying saucer and take a little trip out well clear of this earth and I watch my clock and, say, come back in three hours time, and we again compare clocks, maybe your clock says I’ve been gone an hour, my clock says I’ve been gone three hours. Both clocks are strictly correct. You’ve experienced an hour in the time that hand went around once; in that same interval I experienced three hours—and they were three real hours, not an illusion. The theory of relativity talks about this dilation. But this leads to a paradox and I think that anyone who is at all mathematically inclined and has taken the trouble to look at the relativistic time paradox is probably disturbed by it. According to the theory of relativity, if I climb into a spacecraft and start out from the earth, here, at a velocity very nearly the velocity of light and I go out to, say, Alpha Proxima, and then I turn around and come back, people on the earth say I’ve been gone something like 10 years. According to my clock I’ve only been gone a year. Now that is a result, apparently, of the time dilation in the theory of relativity in that the spacecraft was moving, relative to the earth at a velocity very nearly equal to the velocity of light. The paradox arises when you consider that relative to the spacecraft, the earth was traveling away at exactly the same velocity, so therefore, to the people on the spacecraft who are relatively stationary, 10 years should have passed and by the time the earth came back to them it should only have been away a year. So you can see right away the very premise on which the theory of relativity is predicated, namely, that if B is relative to A, then A must be relative to B, leads you to an impossible paradox. This paradox is resolved completely if you recognize the variable nature of time. As you move around from one part of the universe to the other, you encounter all sorts of values of time in certain given intervals. Now I find that this idea of the concept of the variable nature of time to be almost incomprehensible to most people because, as they say, a Swede is only a Norwegian with his brains beaten out, I think that that is what has happened to most of us. We were born with more intelligence than we have after we graduate from university because we’ve had it beaten out of us in the process. The very first thing that we learn when we are a very small child is that the feeding must be regulated by the clock. We don’t know about the clock, but regardless of how we feel on the subject we still get the bottle at a certain particular time, and this carries on right through our conscious life. Every time we do something we check with the clock. We become slaves to the clock to the extent that we believe that the intervals cut out by the clock are time itself. So we find it very difficult to readjust. Now I don’t propose to say anything more about this particular aspect, but I would like to say something on the subject of the craft themselves.
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