Evening star., 1936-02-11

A creation sealed everlastingly in i'm
penetrable walls Of nothingness was pic
tured before the Philosophical Society
of Washington the other night by Prof.
Herbert Dingle, professor of astrophysics
at the Imperial College of Science in
London.
Such a universe would be the total
aggregation of matter-stars, star dust.
galaxies, supergalaxies and metagalaxies
whose mass attraction would be so
great that nothing could get outside it.
A projectile of any kind, although pro-
jected with the speed of light. would
instantly be pulled back into the sys-
luminous body within the universe,
would be bent back toward its source.
This universe would constitute closed
system. since 1t could not be affected by
anything outside itself. If it could be
it would not constitute the universe
by definition, everything that is. Nothing
ever could be known of what lay outside
it because nothing ever could get out
side 1t, and there could be no deductions
from the effects of outside bodies upon it.
For such universe. as whole, there
could be no time because there could
be no external phenomenon with which
to measure time. Time could only exist
within the system itself, being de-
termined by the inter relations of its
parts. But it would exist only for the
parts, not for the whole. Neither could
there be any space for the whole, for
space must be something which can be
penetrated in order to measure it, and
here there could be no penetration. There
could only be space occupied.
DR.. Dingle didn't picture this as the
actual universe in which we live. It is,
however, one of the two alternative pos
sibilities allowed by present-day asto-
physics-the paradoxical finite, but
boundless universe of one school of
relativists.
Assuming that this is fair picture
of Creation, one never can tell where
one is within it. An astronomer living
on planet of some star located at the
very edge Of the impenetrable void of
nothing might turn his telescope in that
direction and see objects millions of light
years distant. But he only would be
kidding himself. He actually would be
looking at the stars behind him and not
in front Of him, because he would be
seeing them by light which had been
bent backward on its course by the weight
of the universe. No telescope can pene-
trate nothing. Even the earth itself
might be on the edge. Nobody ever will
know anything about it.
Much the same situation obtains In
respect to time. Recently, Prof. Dingle
pointed out, astronomers and mathema-
ticians have been propounding the the
ory that creation must have started about
two billion years ago. This is based on
a hypothesis of the expanding universe
Calculating from the present speeds out
ward of the fartheSt nebulae, they con-
clude that it must have required about
that time for them to have reached their
present distribution from a common
point.
But, the London astronomer stresses,
time is purely an intra-universe affair.
For creation as q whole there can be
no time, but only for its parts. Time
is Of it, not for it. The astronomer on
the time edge of creation would still,
by every means of observation at his dis
posal, be altogether ignorant Of his posi-
tion.' The whole phenomena of the re-
treating nebulae. he pointed out. may be