There are various reasons for doubting whether Einstein’s universe can be quite right.[12] Some of these are rather complicated. But there is one objection which is easily appreciated: in Einstein’s theory, absolute space and time re-enter by another door. The ghostly sun is formed in the “place” where it was a thousand million years ago. Both the “place” and the period of time are in a sense absolute. We saw as early as Chapter I that “place” is a vague and popular notion, incapable of scientific precision. It seems hardly worth while to go through such a vast intellectual labor if the errors we set out to correct are to reappear at the end. [12] See Eddington, _Space, Time and Gravitation_, p. 162ff. De Sitter’s world is even odder than Einstein’s, because time goes mad as well as space. I despair of explaining, in non-mathematical language, the particular form of lunacy with which time is afflicted, but some of its manifestations can be described. An observer in this world, if he observes a number of clocks, each of which is perfectly accurate from its own point of view, will think that distant clocks are going slow as compared with those in his neighborhood. They will seem to go slower and slower, until, at a distance of one quarter of the circumference of the universe, they will seem to have stopped altogether. That region will seem to our observer a sort of lotus land, where nothing is ever done. He will not be able to have any cognizance of things farther off, because no light waves can get across the boundary. Not that there is any real boundary: the people who live in what our observer takes to be lotus land live just as bustling a life as he does, but get the impression that he is eternally standing still. As a matter of fact, you would never become aware of the lotus land, because it would take an infinite time for light to travel from it to you. You could become aware of places just short of it, but it would remain itself always just beyond your ken. There will not be the ghostly suns of Einstein’s world, because light cannot travel so far.