How To Be Invisible by Tim Lott

Author:Tim Lott [Lott, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781406348965
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2013-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE HAUNTING OF MRS AMBER TURNBULL

On Monday morning, I rose early – I didn’t want to be late again. In fact, I got up too early. I was left with about half an hour with nothing to do before leaving to catch the bus. I found myself daydreaming. I thought this sentence to myself: Time is really dragging. Then I started to think about time.

The expression “time is relative” is used colloquially to suggest that sometimes your perception of time is relative – sometimes it seems to go slowly, and sometimes it seems to go fast. But time really is relative. It’s elastic – it stretches and contracts.

If I jumped in a spaceship and headed for the nearest star, which (other than the Sun) is Alpha Centauri – about five light years away – and travelled there at close to the speed of light, then turned round and came back again, I would be ten years older when I arrived back on Earth. But the people I had left behind on Earth – Melchior, Peaches, Lloyd Archibald Turnbull and Dr Ojebande, for example – would not be ten years older.

They would either be very old or dead of old age. A lot more time would have passed for them than for me.

This is not a theory, but a solid, experimentally proven fact. The closer you travel to the speed of light, the slower time goes for you – at least that’s the way it is for someone who isn’t travelling at close to the speed of light, which includes everyone on Earth.

People on Earth are only travelling at a little more than 1,600 kilometres per hour, which is the speed at which the Earth rotates on its axis. Or perhaps they are travelling at 108,000 kilometres per hour, which is the speed that the Earth goes round the Sun.

That’s the point, you see – you can only describe how fast you are going by having something to compare it to.

The only absolute in the universe is the speed of light. This never varies, which is thoroughly weird and magical. Let me give an example of how weird and magical it is.

Imagine you are driving a car along a road at 40 kilometres per hour.

Now imagine that, 80 kilometres away at the opposite end of the road, your father starts driving a car towards you at 40 kilometres per hour.

How long before you and your father reach one another?

Your speed, as far as you are concerned, is 40 kilometres per hour. That is the speed you are travelling at relative to the road. Your father is travelling at the same speed, 40 kilometres per hour, relative to the road.

You are travelling directly towards each other. So relative to one another your speed is 80 kilometres per hour.

Therefore, since you are 80 kilometres apart, you and your father will reach each other in precisely one hour.

Now imagine two laser-beam torches on the same road, 80 kilometres apart.

Imagine that the speed of light is 40 kilometres per hour (which obviously it isn’t, but bear with me).

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