| Description | He thanks Larmor for letters, not replyng because he had been attending the tercentenary of Amsterdam University. He hopes that Larmor will write on comets, as [Nicolas Theodore] Bobrovnikoff writes nonsensical calculations in the Lick Observatory Bulletin. Milne has been deeply excited about work on the expanding universe, which came to him in a flash, he thinks that for any observer distant nebulae receding means that for any one observer space and time are infinite. Space and time are no fundamental realities, only dissections of reality introduced by an observer. 'In all recent exp. universe stuff of [Georges] Lemaitre & [Arthur] Eddington this has been lost sight of...the principle of Relativity really abandoned'. Milne is beginning to think that curvature of space has no meaning, giving his reasoning. He wonders if gravitation can be dealt with in flat space-time as a continuum. By considering a centrally symmetrical universe appearing around each observer, he thinks he has removed a difficulty within Einstein's 1917 paper in which he dealt with the problem of Newtonioan space uniformly filled with matter. On the second law of thermodynamics, Milne's picture has the universe acting as its own Maxwell's sorting demon. |