Various other illustrations will help to show how extraordinary—from the point of view of tradition and common sense—are the facts about the velocity of light. Every one knows that if you are on an escalator you reach the top sooner if you walk up than if you stand still. But if the escalator moved with the velocity of light (which it does not do even in New York), you would reach the top at exactly the same moment whether you walked up or stood still. Again: if you are walking along a road at the rate of four miles an hour, and a motor-car passes you going in the same direction at the rate of forty miles an hour, if you and the motor-car both keep going the distance between you after an hour will be thirty-six miles. But if the motor-car met you, going in the opposite direction, the distance after an hour would be forty-four miles. Now if the motor-car were traveling with the velocity of light, it would make no difference whether it met or passed you: in either case, it would, after a second, be 186,000 miles from you. It would also be 186,000 miles from any other motor-car which happened to be passing or meeting you less rapidly at the previous second. This seems impossible: how can the car be at the same distance from a number of different points along the road? Let us take another illustration. When a fly touches the surface of a stagnant pool, it causes ripples which move outwards in widening circles. The center of the circle at any moment is the point of the pool touched by the fly. If the fly moves about over the surface of the pool, it does not remain at the center of the ripples. But if the ripples were waves of light, and the fly were a skilled physicist, it would find that it always remained at the center of the ripples, however it might move. Meanwhile a skilled physicist sitting beside the pool would judge, as in the case of ordinary ripples, that the center was not the fly, but the point of the pool touched by the fly. And if another fly had touched the water at the same spot at the same moment, it also would find that it remained at the center of the ripples, even if it separated itself widely from the first fly. This is exactly analogous to the Michelson-Morley experiment. The pool corresponds to the ether; the fly corresponds to the earth; the contact of the fly and the pool corresponds to the light signal which Messrs. Michelson and Morley send out; and the ripples correspond to the light waves.