Or if our illustration requires too tall a skyscraper, let us imagine that a comet as it flies by knocks a chip off the earth with a group of people on it. This terrestrial fragment, cast loose in space, gets caught by the attractive force of some gigantic and distant star and falls toward it with ever-increasing velocity for thousands of years. The inhabitants of this errant orb would never know it from their own feelings or any observations they could make _on their own little world_. Does that seem incredible to you? Then tell me how do you know but this our world is such a planet and together with the solar system has been falling for thousands of years toward some center of attraction? Astronomers, indeed, say that we are moving at tremendous speed toward Canis Major, in other words that the world is going to the dogs. All this means that uniformly accelerated motion, such as gravitation imparts to a freely falling body, is, like uniform translatory motion, a question of relativity and cannot be discovered by an observer carried along by such movement. The idea that uniform translation, like the moving train we have considered, is merely relative motion, is an old idea and not hard to understand or accept. But when we try to extend the principle of relativity to acceleration, that is, to a rate of motion that is continuously increased or retarded, we get a new and revolutionary conception of the universe and are drawn into some very startling conclusions. Einstein took this step five years ago and that is what has caused the present excitement. For Einstein when he once gets hold of an idea follows it wherever it leads him with the undaunted determination of a Nantucket sailor towed by a harpooned whale. It was a whale of an idea that he harpooned in 1915 and it carried him into strange waters. It led directly to a contradiction or correction of one of the two fundamental postulates which he had laid down as the foundation of his theory of the universe in 1905, namely, that the velocity of light in space is a constant. But he promptly abandoned this idea with cheerful nonchalance in favor of the new notion that the velocity of light is affected by gravitation. A SUBSTITUTE FOR GRAVITY