City of God by E.L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page A

reference to the universe in its entirety.
    Now, that is a very simple insistence upon which all my further thought is based. That absolute motion and absolute rest are false concepts that cannot be demonstrated. But you see the implications are enormous of this picky stubborn insistence of mine that we deal with these things only insofar as they can be proven. I’ll show you, it’s very simple. We will do a little thought experiment. . .
    If I am in a rocket ship flying through space at millions of miles an hour. . . and you catch up to me in your rocket ship and decelerate your engines so that we are flying at the same speed side by side. . .and a person asleep in each of our rocket ships wakes up and looks from his window into the other’s window. . . without seeing the meteorites and bits of star material whizzing or drifting by. . . but seeing only into each other’s cabin. . . they will not be able to say if the rocket ships are moving uniformly together or not moving at all. Because in either case the experience is the same.
    You see how simple that is? I am really a simple man and I begin with the questions that a child would ask. For example, I was not much more than a child when I wondered what would happen if I traveled at the speed of light. Nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. You know what that means? That means there are no instantaneous processes in our universe, because nothing can occur faster than light can move and light takes time to get from one place to another. That means for example that a person cannot be in two places at the same time. Also for example that there cannot be the ghosts which are cherished by so many people, because ghosts no more than anyone else can appear and disappear as if having taken no time to travel from one place to another. So what I realized when I was a child was that if I were traveling as fast as light while holding a mirror before me, I would not see my image in the mirror, because as fast as the image of my face in light moved toward the mirror, why, just as fast would the mirror be moving away. And there would be nothing I could see in the mirror I was holding up to my face. Yet that does not seem right. It doesn’t feel that this would be the case, does it? It is a rather frightening idea, in fact, that if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflected light such as a mirror. I would be like a ghost in the universe, materially unverifiable in the stream of time.
    So from this simple thought experiment I deduced the following: No object, neither mirror nor person, even a thinner person than myself, one who did not indulge in the Sacher torte or tea with raspberry jam or a scone with butter, no, not even the thinnest person alive can move through the universe with the speed of light. Because we are always visible to ourselves in our mirrors and to each other, we must move more slowly than that, though light itself is moving from the surface of our dear faces and from our mirrors at the same constant ultimate speed. We ourselves are slower than that. Even in our fastestrocket ships. Do you know what would happen if we moved toward or closer to the speed of light, going faster and faster, from zero miles an hour to one hundred and eighty-three million miles a second? Do you know what would happen to us? My goodness, we would get so leaden, heavier and heavier the faster we went, until our immense weight or density would be so great that the space around us would curve toward us and we would suck space into such density around us that. . . as fast as we might go, the less we would have the chance of attaining the speed of light. . . because the faster we moved, the more mass we would have and the more mass, the greater the resistance to our progress. . . until the celestial heaven around us would curl and bend and warp itself and us out of all recognition.
    And