RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 84, 3 January 1940, Page 6

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights On Current

Events

(By

Kickshaws.}

Those holding fearsome income tax demands believe that the road to prosperity might well be paved with good extensions.

A visitor says he is surprised at the amount of tea drunk in New Zealand. Maybe he hasn’t tried our coffee.

The American tennis authorities declare that they will not challenge Australia for the Davis Gup till after the war. Let’s get one racket fixed at a time.

Well, we are now fairly launched into the year 1940. We do not know any more of what lies ahead than we did when the world swung into 1939. Every day we have been spinning round and round like an orange on a string in front of a lamp. Every day we have taken from our lamp everything that we are using to destroy one another. The sun has given us everything, but it has unwisely left us to determine how we shall use it. It rests with 1940 to see what happens. Meanwhile. the world goes on spinning. It goes on travelling round the sun one trip in every year. The sun with its planets is also on the move in a great wheel round the milky way. This takes 230,000,000 years to complete one turn. The whole of the Milky Way, moreover, is rushing toward a distant star at the rate of 20 miles a second or more. The world, therefore, never traverses the same bit of space twice. Always it is exploring, never doing the same thing. We mortals rush along hitched to this mad momentum apparently getting madder every year.

Even the movements that grip us and carry us along into the years that come tumbling out of motion appear to have no sanity. Those who have studied the stellar system say that it, too, is making a mad rush away from the centre of things. The whole of the stellar system is exploding and rushing away from itself at 500 miles a second, making more space as it goes.. Whither it is all going, who shall know. The story that the stars give us is written in light rays but they suffer from a time complex. All that we shall know and our ancestors shall know of the mad rushing of the stars for the next 200,009,000 years is on its way to us now speeding on light at 186,000 miles a second. Our knowledge, therefore, is limited by time. We cannot grasp more than there is in the space of our own tiny lives. We live like the spark of a flint that flares and dies in a second compared with the vast reservoirs of time that are all around. Our knowledge, therefore, is almost insufficient to grasp the significance even of a New Year.. It signifies more than one more journey round the sun. It signifies new space to explore but we have not learned how. » « » We live in a matter of fact sort of way counting the minutes until we shall meet a loved one or the hours until a friend departs. We add up our days and call it a week and a month until the time comes to do so again and again. But we get nowhere, though our world is taking us everywhere at the rate of 20 miles a second and other faster rates of which we know so little that even the learned men only have a suspicion. We like to imagine that we live in reality. But we do not know if the reality we create is but imagination. There are wise men who do not count the days or take stock of wars and other human frailties. They live in unreality according to our realization, but they tell us that if w.e go on for ever we shall be where we are today. It seems strange, therefore, that we call it a New Year, if it be only the road returning. The New Year to us is but a fact that Christinas is over but we forget that every day is a new year from a year ago and all days bad their counterparts in endless array for the last 2,000,000,000 years and will do so for ten times that space of time. Why do we take such stock of this microscopic fragment of star dust on which we find ourselves. We could halt this speck of dust in 365 days if we could create 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 horses and then the New Year would end in a year. Meanwhile, the thing we call a year is running down of its own. No man has computed the change but the time will come when a New Year will lose any significance. As for the space we call a day, that too ig running down. The world is slowing down as it revolves. Every 100 years the world takes .0037 of a second more to trundle round from day to night. V e take more heed of the New Year thau we do of the fact that days are getting out of gear with time. The time will come when there will be no night and dav, but day all day or all night. Moreover, the world will slow up so that it keeps one side to the moon perpetually. The day will then last 47 days which is absurd, but no more absurd than the eternal repetition of a New J-®a r - We need have no worry because the world will then be older than today by 119,000,000,000 million years which is 10.000.000,000 years longer than the life of the sun. That too is absurd but mavbe all things are absurd if could only get the correct viewpoint perched that distance away in time. $ ♦ ♦ We shall spin through 1940 at 1000 miles an hour if we live on the Equator mid we shall flaunt our worldly message through the stars as we rumble round the sun at 68,000 miles an hour. We are doomed for the next 3000 years to perpetuate the errors of the New Year until a day will go astray. There will then be the outcry there was vhen 10 days got lost to catch up with time. Actually we see the New Year in at the wrong time, but nobody takes heed because compared with the flick of a lifetime .12048 of a day is nothing. Nevertheless, those who are sticklers for time might well uote that the year takes 365.242198 S days. One day man will learn to measure time moie accurately and we shall see in the N>ew Year by methods not yet devised, w Lien we rejoice at this curious moment we < o not know for what we shout. v\e acclaim the time when the moon nilfall back to earth, when the earth will stand still and the sun will wane. Aff things will come to a standstill. of the forces of the sun and the stars will stimulate the madness of niatiKn for there will be none. We rejoice every New Year that this time draw nearer by one more year. Maybe we are wise to rejoice. * « « Oh I blest with temper, whose uncloudCan maketomorrow cheerful as to ( 'ay • She, who can love a sisters ch. Siglis e for a daughter with unwounded She Who ne’er answers till a husband Or, if ohe rules him. never shows she Charms by accepting, by submitting Yet ha's J h’er humour most when she ObeyS '