Our passengers’ purses will, even if they are full of gold, no longer be heavy in their pockets—which may give them a momentary anxiety. If their hats are released from their hands, they will remain suspended in the air beside them. If they happen to have scales with them, they will notice that the pans remain poised at equal height, even if various weights are put in one pan. All this is because the objects, as a natural effect of their weight, fall toward the ground with the same velocity as the lift itself. Their weight has disappeared. * * * * * Jules Verne described this state of things in the projectile which he imagined taking his heroes from the earth to the moon, at the moment when the romantic projectile reaches the “neutral point”: that is to say, the point where it leaves the earth’s sphere of gravitation, but has not yet entered that of the moon. We might add that Jules Verne perpetrated a few little scientific heresies in connection with his projectile. In particular, he forgot that, in compliance with what is most conspicuously evident in the principle of inertia, the unfortunate passengers ought to have been flattened like pancakes against the bottom of the projectile when the charge was fired. He also wrongly supposed that objects ceased to have weight in the projectile only at the point where it was exactly between the two spheres of attraction, that of the earth and that of the moon. But let us overlook these trifles and return to the admirable illustration he has prophetically provided for our convenience in explaining Einstein’s system. Let us take the projectile when it begins to fall freely toward the moon.[9] It is evident that from this point onward, until it lands on the moon, it will behave exactly like the lift which we have described. [9] It is obvious that we assume the projectile to be without rotation: that is to say, the Columbia cannon must not, in our hypotheses, be rifled. This is indispensable, for if the projectile turned, there would be centrifugal effects which would greatly complicate both the phenomena and our argument. During this fall upon the moon the passengers, if they have miraculously escaped being flattened at the start, will see the various objects about them suddenly deprived of their weight, floating in the air, and, at the slightest shake, adhering to the walls or the vaulted roof of the projectile. They will feel themselves extraordinarily light, and they will be able to make prodigious leaps without any effort. This is because they and all the objects about them fall toward the moon with the same velocity as the projectile. Hence the disappearance of weight or gravitation, which vanish as if spirited away by some magician. The magician is the properly accelerated movement, the unimpeded fall of the observers.