ALICE IN EINSTEINLAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 647, 26 April 1929, Page 16

ALICE IN EINSTEINLAND

following clever skit, ■which is at once a parody of the celebrated “hatter’s tea party” in “Alice in Wonderland,” and a jocose exposition of wliat the ordinary reader may consider the vagaries and paradoxes of the relativity theory, is from the column headed “By-Products,” in the “New York Times”: “As for this new discovery of Einstein’s,” said the Hatter, “suppose we postpone our discussion of it to yesterday?” “Don’t be absurd,” said Alice. “You can only postpone things to the future.” The Hatter’s smile was not unkindly. “Not if you were an electron travelling backward through infinity with the speed of light, you wouldn’t,” he said. “You'd pretty soon see yesterda}*, and then the day before yesterday, and then you last birthday, and pretty soon you'd be one day old, and so forth.” “I think she must have had a red face,” said the Dormouse, speaking with an exceptional field of gravity. Alice came very near losing her temper. .“I wish you wouldn't try to be impudent and vulgar,” she said. “I am not electron, and I trust I have better manners than to go moving backward anywhere like a crab.” The Hatter had by this time grown really fond of Alice, and would not have her break up the party for anything. “Very well,” he said. “I shall explain the matter to you right now; but you understand, of course, that I shall frequently have to express myself in the fourth dimension.” “And what is that?” said Alice. “You astonish me,” said the Hatter.

“Don’t you remember your grammar? First dimension, I am; second dimension, thou art; third dimension, he, she, it is; fourth dimension, Nobody always anywhere hardly ever shall have was. If I were the Prussian Academy of Science, I couldn’t make it any plainer.” “I think you are talking nonsense,” said Alice. “Those weren’t dimensions in grammar you were reciting, those were persons. First person, second person, third person, and that’s all. Whoever heard of Fourth person ?”

The Dormouse looked up timidly. “In the subway,” he said, “I have frequently seen as many as four persons at one time.”

But Alice merely sniffed and turned her back. “Very well," said the Hatter, “call them persons. And what would be the past tense of the second person singular, Thou?” “Persons and things don’t have tenses,” said Alice curtly. “You think so, hey?” said the Hatter, wiping the salad bowl carefully and putting it on his head like a skullcap. “Well, you’d pretty soon find out how many future and past tenses thou havest if you were moving through infinity with the speed of lightning. Why, Alice, out in Betelgeuse—how old are you?” “I shall be 11 next May,” she said stiffly. “Well, out in Betelgeuse, which is only 200,000 light-years away, do you know how old you are, right now? You are minus 199,989 years old, and you couldn’t be expected to understand what happens to Thou when it passeth through a gravitational field of force and hits a pile of electrodynamite.”