UNIVERSE A “FAKE”

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXXII, Issue 12535, 23 April 1935, Page 7

UNIVERSE A “FAKE”

PEOPLE LIVING IN FOOL’S PARADISE.

A SCIENTIST’S .CLAIM

The universe was shown- up as a fake recently in America, states the "Christian Science Monitor.” A natural scientist "debunked” it, and revealed it as a fool’s paradise for people—including some natural scientists—who really thought they knew what it was like. The fake universe is the universe we know, and probably we will always have to get along the he.st we can with it, because the’ real one is likely to be a will-o’-the-wisp just beyond our reach. Vie can’t measure the real world, time it, or take its temperature with anything like real accuracy, Dr. L. R. Tuokerrnnn told the Washington Academy of Sciences. Paradoxically In' is an expert measurer himself. Tie is one the staff of the National Bureau of Standards where tin 1 nation’s most a ecu rate measuring is done. There’s no cause to worry, for our "fake universe” is not different enough from the real one to cause inconvenience. We can get along with our foot rules that do not really measure a foot, clocks that do not measure an hour and thermometers that do not actually tell how cold it is. Many of our facts are fictions, Dr Tuckennari said. For example under certain condition there are pbd.t different ways of defining n straight lino, ft is not always just the shortest distance between two points. Nobody rcnly knows the height of any mountain because heights are measured from sea level, and sea level at different points on earth is not the same. There is not any such thing as "•absolute zero,” the coldest possible cold, though recently some natural scientists succeeded in producing a temperature only 18 one-hundredths of a degree above this fictional point. So is the idea, that a. moving object always goes in a straight line unless something compels it to change its direction. Nobody knows the exact latitude and longitude of any place on earth, and nobody ever will, because the earth wobbles and upsets the calculations. The best you can do is allow for an average wobble, and that also is a fiction. The northern boundary of the United States, supposed to follow the 94th parallel, really is as much as 700 feet out of line in spaces as short as 20 miles.