Acknowledgement

This book, for all its smallness, owes so much to so many that any adequate acknowledgment seems out of the question. "We stand on the shoulders of giants" — many giants. The debt goes back to many inancient Greece, to Euclid, and to Democritus who believed in "atoms and the void, and the gravity of atoms." In ancient India, it goes back to the authors of the Upanishads, whose names we don’t know. The debt goes back, in more recent times, to such figures as Galileo and Newton,in Europe, and to Shankara, in India. In modern times it goes back to NikolaTesla, who tried to show that what we call matter is simply potential energy, and to Albert Einstein, who succeeded. On the Asiatic side it goes back to Swami Vivekananda, who posed the problem to Tesla, and to Swami Ashokananda, who posed the problem to me.* I should also mention certain other persons whom I had the good fortune to meet, such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and Dr. E. O. Lawrence, under whom I studied at the university. Then there is Erwin Schrödinger, whom I failed to meet. Finally, among persons still living, I must acknowledge my special indebtedness to Sir Fred Hoyle and to Dr. Richard Feynman. But there is another debt which I feel bound to acknowledge. That is the debt to those who have left mistakes, some large, some small, in their presentation of the material, either in lectures or in their printed works.The great benefit, to me, of these mistakes has been that they forced meto sleuth my way through with a growing distrust of both the spoken and the printed word. And I hope the same distrust will guide the readers of this book. Einstein himself, when discussing Mach’s principle that inertia here dependson inertia there, suggested that if we took a test particle far from theother matter of the universe, its rest mass (its inertia) should approach zero. No! It is the separation of the test particle, in the gravitational field, from all the other matter of the universe that gives it its restmass. not its proximity. Although the gravitational field strength goes up with proximity, the gravitational energy is related to the space between the particles and goes up with their separation. Another such mistake, which can he found in almost any physics text, isthat the path of a projectile in a gravitational field (overlooking friction,etc.) is a parabola. No! It would be a parabola only if the gravitational field were non-convergent (parallel), but it is a fundamental characteristic of the universe that gravitational fields are always convergent. That ishow one could tell from within Einstein’s famous closed box whether that box was being pulled faster and faster with a constant acceleration, or whether it was at rest in a gravitational field. If the box were being constantly accelerated, the path of a projectile with respect to the boxwould be parabolic; but if the box were at rest in a gravitational field, the path would be an ellipse. Although, numerically, the mistake would be minor, conceptually, it is total. Let the reader of the present work beware! Another such mistake is quite usually made in discussing the geometrical aspect of relativity theory. It is often said that, between two events, where one observer sees more of time and less of space, another observer, moving with respect to the first, would see more of space and less of time.Once again, no! Time is not another dimension of space. The observer who sees the greater space between the two events sees also the greater time. Let the reader beware! *The task of reconciling Advaita Vedanta with modern science was laid on my head long ago by Swami Ashokananda. The present work was written thirty years later at the request of Swami Swahananda of Hollywood as a series of articles to be published in Prabuddha Bharata, an English magazine of the Ramakrishna Order in India.