hind your back. His voice was dry and flat with the barest trace of foreign accent.
Stoddard had not listened for more than five minutes before he began to experience the same sense of bewilderment that little Dorothy must have felt on her first trip to the land of Oz. As nearly as he could gather, Friedmann considered the familiar everyday world to constitute merely a tiny corner or "clot" in a vastly higher order of space-time or "Xi space." Ordinarily, events in the Xi space are on too gross a scale to exert a sensible effect on the finegrained clot space. On rare occasions, however, a clot might be seriously disturbed by events of an exceptional nature in the Xi space, in somewhat the same way that the atoms on the surface of a stick of amber may be disturbed by rubbing it vigorously. When events in the super-cosmos happen to intrude upon an individual clot extraordinary results ensue; for example, angular momentum is not strictly conserved, and Hamilton's equations require modification, to mention only a few.
"Thus for a properly oriented observer the universe must at all times have a radius equal to tau times the velocity of light," said Friedmann, by way of conclusion. "Hence, if tau increases uniformly we must of necessity have the expanding universe as shown by the general recession of the extragalactic nebulae.
"But this increase in tau time is not really uniform but a statistical effect. Local fluctuations in the Xi space may attain such magnitude as to become distinctly perceptible in clot space. Evidence for the Xi effect in our vicinity is shown by the behavior of the Andromeda nebula, which instead of sharing in the general recession is approaching the Earth at three hundred kilometers per second. Again, certain anomalies in the motion of the inner planets, notably the secular variation in the node of Venus,[1] clearly indicate encroachment of the Xi effect within the confines of our own solar system. Further anomalies of increasing magnitude may be anticipated."
With a curt nod he gathered together his papers and sat down abruptly, scarcely bothering to acknowledge the prolonged applause from the student section. The secretary of the Astronomy and Physics Club thanked Dr. Friedmann for his address which he was sure they had all enjoyed, and inquired if there were any questions. This announcement was followed by the customary minute of awkward silence. Finally the spell was broken by Fosberg, an authority on the theory of numbers and uncrowned king of the faculty's eccentric characters.
"As I get it, this postulated Xi
- ↑ The outstanding difference between gravitational theory and observation is the well-known discrepancy of 43" per century in the motion of the perihelion of Mercury. Einstein's explanation of this discrepancy was considered a triumph for relativity.
The next largest difference between gravitational theory and observation is the secular variation of 13" per century in the node of Venus, which has not been explained by relativity. See Journal of the Optical Society of America, vol. 30, p. 225, 1930.
