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 Going to the
MOVI ES
Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema

edited by Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen

 g oing t o the mov ies

From Manhattan nickelodeons to the modern suburban megaplex,

and from provincial, small-town or rural America to Istanbul and
the shanty-towns of Southern Africa, Going to the Movies analyses
the diverse historical and geographical circumstances in which
audiences have viewed American cinema, and the variety of ways
in which these audiences have been constructed by the American
film industry.
The book examines the role of movie theatres in local
communities, the links between film and other entertainment
media, non-theatrical exhibition and historical trends toward the
globalization of audiences. Two novel features of the book are the
emphasis on movie-going outside the metropolitan centres of the
American North-East and the manner in which several of the
chapters analyse the complexities of race and race formation in
relation to cinema attendance.
Many of the leading researchers in this rapidly-developing
field of cinema history have contributed to this collection, which
showcases the range of issues and perspectives being examined by
film scholars and historians who are exploring the complexities of
the social experience of movie-going.

Editors: Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders

University, South Australia. Melvyn Stokes teaches at University
College London. Robert C. Allen is Professor of American Studies,
History, and Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
 Exeter Studies in Film History
Published by University of Exeter Press in association with the Bill Douglas
Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.

Series Editors: Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University,

South Australia and Steve Neale, Professor of Film Studies and Academic
Director of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular
Culture, University of Exeter.

Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema

Lynne Kirby (1997)
The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939
Ruth Vasey (1997)
‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939
edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (1999)
A Paul Rotha Reader
edited by Duncan Petrie and Robert Kruger (1999)
A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929–1939
David Sutton (2000)
The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema
Laurent Mannoni, translated by Richard Crangle (2000)
Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures
John Sedgwick (2000)
Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism
Martin Stollery (2000)
Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail
Peter Stanfield (2001)
Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930
edited by Andrew Higson (2002)
Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films 1908–1918
Jon Burrows (2003)
The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914­–1918)
Michael Hammond (2006)
Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet
edited by James Lyons and John Plunkett (2007)

University of Exeter Press also publishes the celebrated five-volume series looking at
the early years of English cinema, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, by John
Barnes.
Going to the Movies
Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema

edited by
Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen
 First published in 2007 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR
UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk

© Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen,

and the individual contributors 2007

The right of Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen,

and the individual contributors, to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 0 85989 812 6

Hardback ISBN 978 0 85989 811 9

Typeset in 10½ on 13 Adobe Caslon

by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Printed in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter
Cover image: An African American moviegoer climbs the stairs to the ‘Jim Crow
roost’ in a motion picture theatre in Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939.
 Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Notes on Contributors x
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes

Part I: Studies of Local Cinema Exhibition

1. Race, Region, and Rusticity: Relocating U.S. Film History 25

Robert C. Allen
2. Tri-racial Theaters in Robeson County, North Carolina,
1896–1940 45
Christopher J. McKenna
3. The White in the Race Movie Audience 60
Jane M. Gaines
4. Sundays in Norfolk: Toward a Protestant Utopia Through
Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1910–1920 76
Terry Lindvall
5. Patchwork Maps of Moviegoing, 1911–1913 94
Richard Abel
6. Next Year at the Moving Pictures: Cinema and Social
Change in the Jewish Immigrant Community 113
Judith Thissen
 g oing to the mov ies

7. ‘Four Hours of Hootin’ and Hollerin’’: Moviegoing and

Everyday Life Outside the Movie Palace 130
Jeffrey Klenotic
8. Cinemagoing in the United States in the mid-1930s:
A Study Based on the Variety Dataset 155
Mark Glancy and John Sedgwick
9. Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts, and Lily White Palaces:
Desegregating the Motion Picture Theater 196
Thomas Doherty

Part II: Other Cinema: Alternatives to Theatrical Exhibition

10. The Reel of the Month Club: 16mm Projectors, Home

Theaters and Film Libraries in the 1920s 217
Haidee Wasson
11. Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon Gould and the Little
Cinema Movement of the 1920s 235
Anne Morey
12. Free Talking Picture—Every Farmer is Welcome: Non-
theatrical Film and Everyday Life in Rural America during
the 1930s 248
Gregory A. Waller
13. Cinema’s Shadow: Reconsidering Non-theatrical Exhibition 273
Barbara Klinger

Part III: Hollywood Movies in Broader Perspective:

Audiences at Home and Abroad

14. Changing Images of Movie Audiences 293

Richard Butsch
15. ‘Healthy Films from America’: The Emergence of a Catholic
Film Mass Movement in Belgium and the Realm of
Hollywood, 1928–1939 307
Daniel Biltereyst

vi
 contents

16. The Child Audience and the ‘Horrific’ Film in 1930s

Britain 323
Annette Kuhn
17. Hollywood in Vernacular: Translation and Cross-cultural
Reception of American Films in Turkey 333
Ahmet Gürata
18. Cowboy Modern: African Audiences, Hollywood Films,
and Visions of the West 348
Charles Ambler
19. ‘Opening Everywhere’: Multiplexes and the Speed of
Cinema Culture 364
Charles R. Acland
20. ‘Cinema Comes to Life at the Cornerhouse, Nottingham’:
‘American’ Exhibition, Local Politics and Global Culture in
the Construction of the Urban Entertainment Centre 383
Mark Jancovich
Notes 394
Index 462

vii
 Illustrations

2.1 Community Service Pictures’ Special Announcement, 1920 50

2.2 The newly reopened Pastime Theater in Lumberton, 1934 53
2.3 The theater changed to cater mainly for African Americans,
prompting Indian outrage, 1934 53
2.4 The Rowland Theatre reopened in 1937 with three race-specific
entrances, 1937 56
2.5 Race-specific pricing structure: advertisement from the Riverside
Theater for the film Topper Takes a Trip, 1939 58
3.1 Lincoln Motion Picture Company distribution survey form, 1918 61
3.2 Noble Johnson and Harry Gant, Lincoln Company cameraman 64
3.3 The Flying Ace poster, Norman Manufacturing Company, 1926 65
3.4 The Ebony Motion Picture Company 66
3.5 Opening Night of the Rex Theater, Hannibal, Missouri; and detail
of the balcony 70
3.6 Noble Johnson, early ‘cross-over’ star 74
4.1 Billy Sunday, 1915 77
4.2 Judged by their formal attire in this cartoon, members of the
social elite did attend motion pictures 80
4.3 The Granby Family Theatre in Norfolk, 1907 81
4.4 The American Theatre, 1913 82
4.5 Billy Sunday and Mae West, 1933 91

viii
 illustr ations
5.1 Mutual Movies ad, 1914 95
5.2 Advertisement for ‘Iowa’s Most Beautiful Photo Play Theatre’,
1912 97
5.3 Advertisement for the Canton Odeon, 1912 98
5.4 Pawtucket/Central Falls, Rhode Island 104
5.5 Downtown Pawtucket, c. 1913 105
5.6 Advertisement for the Pawtucket Star, 1907 106
5.7 Advertisement for the Star Theatre, 1913 108
6.1 ‘Next Year at the Moving Pictures,’ 1912 114
6.2 ‘Abie’s moving picture’ cartoons, 1912 123
7.1 The Franklin Theater, c. 1940 133
7.2 A map of Springfield showing ‘social quality’ rankings, 1926 139
7.3 One week’s programming at the Franklin theatre, May 1937 152
9.1 Separate entrance, separate seating: ‘Jim Crow roost’ in a motion
picture theater in Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939 198
10.1 Catalogue for Kodak’s 16mm Kodascope Library Service, 1930 223
10.2 Advertisement for Pathégrams, 1930 224
10.3 Advertisement for a ‘home-talkie’ unit, 1930 227
10.4 ‘A click of the Switch …’ Kodak advertisement, 1927 229
10.5 Advertisement for Kodak’s line of film furniture, 1930 231
12.1 Advertisement for a Free Show in Campbellsville, Kentucky, 1940 249
12.2 Ad for John Deere Day, 1938 254
12.3 The 1926 USDA Motion Picture Catalogue 263
15.1 Father Felix Morlion 312
15.2 Lloyd Bacon’s Wonder Bar, 1934 318
17.1 Vue de remerciements au public, 1900 334
17.2 Ferdi Tayfur dubbing a Laurel-Hardy film, 1941 340

ix
 Notes on Contributors

Richard Abel is Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies in the

Department of Screen Arts & Culture at the University of Michigan. Most
recently he edited the award-winning Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2005)
and published Americanizing the Movies and ‘Movie-Mad’ Audiences, 1910–
1914 (2006). Currently he is co-editing Interrogating the National and Early
Cinema (forthcoming) and completing research for Trash Twins Making Good:
Newspapers and the Movies, 1911–1915.
Charles R. Acland is Professor and Concordia Research Chair in Communication
Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches media and cultural
theory and history. His books include Residual Media (2007), an edited
collection of research on the aging of media and culture, and Screen Traffic:
Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (2003). Currently, he is working on a
history of popular ideas about media manipulation called Hidden Messages.
Robert C. Allen is James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies,
History, and Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. He is the author of Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American
Culture (1991), which was awarded the Theatre Library Association’s George
Freedley Memorial Award, and of Speaking of Soap Operas (1985). He is the
co-author with Douglas Gomery of Film History: Theory and Practice (1985), and
the editor of two editions of Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary
Criticism (1987, 1992). His most recent book is The Television Studies Reader
(2004), which he co-edited with Annette Hill.
Charles Ambler is Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso.
His publications include Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (1988),
Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa (1993, with Jonathan Crush), and (with
Emmanuel Akyeampong) a special issue of the International Journal of African
Historical Studies on leisure in colonial Africa (2003). He is currently working


 contr ibu tors
on a study of Alcohol and Empire as well as a general book on Popular Culture
and Mass Media in Modern Africa.
Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film, Television and Cultural Media Studies,
Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the Working Group Film and TV
Studies (www.wgfilmtv.ugent.be). His work is on screen culture as sites of
controversy, public debate and moral/media panic, more specifically on film
censorship and the historical reception of controversial movies and genres.
Recent essays can be found in: Understanding Reality TV (2004), Rebel without
a Cause: Approaches to a Maverick Masterwork (2005), Communication Theory
and Research (2005), Youth Culture in Global Cinema (2007), Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television (2007).
Richard Butsch is Professor of Sociology, American Studies, and Film and
Media Studies at Rider University. He is author of The Making of American
Audiences from Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (2000) and The Citizen Audience:
Crowds, Publics and Individuals (2007); and editor of For Fun and Profit: The
Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (1990) and Media and Public Spheres
(2007).
Thomas Doherty is a Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University.
He is an associate editor of Cineaste and the author of Teenagers and Teenpics:
The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (1988), Projections of War:
Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (1993), Pre-Code Hollywood:
Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (1999), Cold
War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (2003),
and Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration
(2007).
Jane M. Gaines is Professor of Literature and English at Duke University,
where she founded the Film/Video/Digital Program. She is author of two
award-winning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (1991)
and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (2001). Currently she is
working on The Documentary Destiny of Cinema and Fictioning Histories: Women
in the Silent Era International Film Industries.
Mark Glancy is a Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of
London, where he teaches courses in American and British film history. His
publications include When Hollywood Loved Britain (1999), The 39 Steps: A British
Film Guide (2003), and, as co-editor, The New Film History: Sources, Methods,
Approaches (2007).
Ahmet Gürata is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Bilkent
University, Ankara. He has written on Turkish cinema and cross-cultural
reception. He is currently researching on local film culture in Turkey.

xi
 g oing to the mov ies
Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University
of East Anglia. He is the author of several books, including: Horror (1992);
Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (1996); and The Place of the Audience:
Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (with Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings,
2003). His edited books include: Approaches to Popular Film (with Joanne
Hollows, 1995); Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste
(with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andrew Willis, 2003); and
Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (with Paul Grainge and Sharon
Monteith, 2006).
Jeffrey Klenotic is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University
of New Hampshire-Manchester. His essays on cinema history and histori-
ography have been published in the Communication Review, the Velvet Light Trap
and Film History, as well as in several edited anthologies and encyclopedias. He
is currently developing a research tool on moviegoing and cultural geography
using Geographic Information System (GIS) software to construct interactive
maps from multiple databases.
Barbara Klinger is a Professor in the Department of Communication and
Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where she teaches film
and media studies. Her research focuses on reception studies, fan studies, and
cinema’s relationship to new media. Along with numerous articles, she is author
of Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (1994)
and Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (2006).
Annette Kuhn writes and teaches on films, cinema history, visual culture, and
cultural memory. She is co-editor of Screen; Visiting Professor at Queen Mary,
University of London; Docent in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University;
and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include An Everyday Magic:
Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002); Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and
Imagination (2002), and (co-edited with Kirsten Emiko McAllister) Locating
Memory: Photographic Acts (2006). Her book on Lynne Ramsay’s film Ratcatcher
is forthcoming in the BFI Modern Classics series.
Terry Lindvall holds the endowed C.S. Lewis Chair of Communication and
Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia, and is
the author of Sanctuary Cinema (2007), The Silents of God: Silent American Film
and Religion (2001) and other works. He has been executive producer of over
50 award-winning films (Cradle of Genius, 2003) including several Student
Academy Awards (Bird in a Cage 1986), and has taught at Duke University and
the College of William and Mary.
Christopher J. McKenna is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Studies
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is completing a
dissertation concerning the history of moviegoing in Robeson County, North

xii
 contr ibu tors
Carolina (focusing on issues of race, censorship, and entrepreneurship). After
nearly twenty years in the financial-technology industry, he currently serves
as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Smith Breeden
Associates, Inc., a global investment management firm.
Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Head of the School of
Humanities at Flinders University, South Australia. His publications include
Hollywood Cinema (2nd edition 2003), Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the
Twentieth Century (1989), Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of
Consensus (1983), and ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and
Cultural Exchange, 1925–1939 (1999), which won the Prix Jean Mitry for cinema
history in 2000, as well as numerous articles and essays.
Anne Morey is an associate professor in English at Texas A&M University.
Her book Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–1934
(2003) deals with Hollywood’s critics and co-opters in the later silent and early
sound periods. She has published in Film History, Quarterly Review of Film
and Video, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other venues. She is
presently at work on a history of religious film-making in the United States
from the late nineteenth century to the present.
John Sedgwick is a film economic historian who lectures at London
Metropolitan University. He is particularly concerned with the measurement
and interpretation of film popularity and has developed a methodology
(POPSTAT) for estimating the former. His publications include Film-going in
Britain during the 1930s (2000), an anthology of articles on the Economic History
of Film (2005) edited with Mike Pokorny, and essays in Cinema Journal (2006)
Explorations in Economic History (1998), the Journal of Cultural History (2001),
the Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review (2005).
Melvyn Stokes teaches at University College London, where he has been
principal organiser of the Commonwealth Fund Conference on American
History since 1988. His edited books include Race and Class in the American
South since 1890 (1994), The Market Revolution in America (1996), and The
State of U.S. History (2002). He has co-edited, with Richard Maltby, four
volumes on cinema audiences: American Movie Audiences (1999), Identifying
Hollywood’s Audiences (1999), Hollywood Spectatorship (2001) and Hollywood
Abroad (2004). His book D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’: A History of
‘The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time’ has just been published by
Oxford University Press.
Judith Thissen is Assistant Professor in Media History, Utrecht University,
Netherlands. She is the author of several essays on the politics of popular
entertainment in the immigrant Jewish community of New York City. Her most
recent publications include ‘Film and Vaudeville on New York’s Lower East

xiii
 g oing to the mov ies
Side’ in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2007), ‘National and Local
Movie Moguls: Two Patterns of Jewish Showmanship in Film Exhibition’ in
Jews and American Popular Culture (2006), and ‘Reconsidering the Decline of
the New York Yiddish Theatre in the Early 1900s,’ Theatre Survey (2003).
Gregory A. Waller is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication
and Culture at Indiana University. His publications on American film include
Moviegoing in America (2002) and Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial
Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1900 (1995), which won the Katherine
Singer Kovacs Award from the Society for Cinema Studies and the Theatre
Library Association award. He is currently completing two projects: Movies on
the Road, a history of itinerant film exhibition, particularly in the 1930s, and
Japan-in-America, a study of the representation of Japan in American culture,
1890–1915 (http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/).
Haidee Wasson is Assistant Professor of Cinema at Concordia University,
Montreal. She has previously taught at the University of Minnesota and Harvard
University. She is author of Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the
Birth of Art Cinema (2005), and co-editor of Inventing Film Studies (2007), on
the history of the discipline of film studies. She has published numerous articles
in journals such as Film History, Convergences, Continuum, Frameworks, and
The Moving Image. Her research interests include extra-theatrical film culture,
historiography, museums and cinema, and emergent screen technologies.

xiv
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 These hour-glasses (drawn through each point of the world
considered in turn as a Here-Now) embody what we know of the
absolute structure of the world so far as space and time are
concerned. They show how the “grain” of the world runs.
Father Time has been pictured as an old man with a scythe and
an hour-glass. We no longer permit him to mow instants through the
world with his scythe; but we leave him his hour-glass.
Since the hour-glass is absolute its two cones provide
respectively an Absolute Future and an Absolute Past for the event
Here-Now. They are separated by a wedge-shaped neutral zone
which (absolutely) is neither past nor future. The common
impression that relativity turns past and future altogether topsy-
turvy is quite false. But, unlike the relative past and future, the
absolute past and future are not separated by an infinitely narrow
present. It suggests itself that the neutral wedge might be called the
Absolute Present; but I do not think that is a good nomenclature. It
is much better described as Absolute Elsewhere. We have abolished
the Now lines, and in the absolute world the present (Now) is
restricted to Here-Now.
Perhaps I may illustrate the peculiar conditions arising from the
wedge-shaped neutral zone by a rather hypothetical example.
Suppose that you are in love with a lady on Neptune and that she
returns the sentiment. It will be some consolation for the melancholy
separation if you can say to yourself at some—possibly prearranged
—moment, “She is thinking of me now”. Unfortunately a difficulty
has arisen because we have had to abolish Now. There is no
absolute Now, but only the various relative Nows differing according
to the reckoning of different observers and covering the whole
neutral wedge which at the distance of Neptune is about eight hours
thick. She will have to think of you continuously for eight hours on
end in order to circumvent the ambiguity of “Now”.
At the greatest possible separation on the earth the thickness of
the neutral wedge is no more than a tenth of a second; so that
terrestrial synchronism is not seriously interfered with. This suggests
a qualification of our previous conclusion that the absolute present is
confined to Here-Now. It is true as regards instantaneous events
(point-events). But in practice the events we notice are of more than
infinitesimal duration. If the duration is sufficient to cover the width
of the neutral zone, then the event taken as a whole may fairly be
considered to be Now absolutely. From this point of view the
“nowness” of an event is like a shadow cast by it into space, and the
longer the event the farther will the umbra of the shadow extend.
As the speed of matter approaches the speed of light its mass
increases to infinity, and therefore it is impossible to make matter
travel faster than light. This conclusion is deduced from the classical
laws of physics, and the increase of mass has been verified by
experiment up to very high velocities. In the absolute world this
means that a particle of matter can only proceed from Here-Now
into the absolute future—which, you will agree, is a reasonable and
proper restriction. It cannot travel into the neutral zone; the limiting
cone is the track of light or of anything moving with the speed of
light. We ourselves are attached to material bodies, and therefore
we can only go on into the absolute future.
Events in the absolute future are not absolutely Elsewhere. It
would be possible for an observer to travel from Here-Now to the
event in question in time to experience it, since the required velocity
is less than that of light; relative to the frame of such an observer
the event would be Here. No observer can reach an event in the
neutral zone, since the required speed is too great. The event is not
Here for any observer (from Here-Now); therefore it is absolutely
Elsewhere.

The Absolute Distinction of Space and Time. By dividing the world

into Absolute Past and Future on the one hand and Absolute
Elsewhere on the other hand, our hour-glasses have restored a
fundamental differentiation between time and space. It is not a
distinction between time and space as they appear in a space-time
frame, but a distinction between temporal and spatial relations.
Events can stand to us in a temporal relation (absolutely past or
future) or a spatial relation (absolutely elsewhere), but not in both.
The temporal relations radiate into the past and future cones and
the spatial relations into the neutral wedge; they are kept absolutely
separated by the Seen-Now lines which we have identified with the
grain of absolute structure in the world. We have recovered the
distinction which the Astronomer Royal confused when he associated
time with the merely artificial Now lines.
I would direct your attention to an important difference in our
apprehension of time-extension and space-extension. As already
explained our course through the world is into the absolute future,
i.e. along a sequence of time-relations. We can never have a similar
experience of a sequence of space-relations because that would
involve travelling with velocity greater than light. Thus we have
immediate experience of the time-relation but not of the space-
relation. Our knowledge of space-relations is indirect, like nearly all
our knowledge of the external world—a matter of inference and
interpretation of the impressions which reach us through our sense-
organs. We have similar indirect knowledge of the time-relations
existing between the events in the world outside us; but in addition
we have direct experience of the time-relations that we ourselves
are traversing—a knowledge of time not coming through external
sense-organs, but taking a short cut into our consciousness. When I
close my eyes and retreat into my inner mind, I feel myself
enduring, I do not feel myself extensive. It is this feeling of time as
affecting ourselves and not merely as existing in the relations of
external events which is so peculiarly characteristic of it; space on
the other hand is always appreciated as something external.
That is why time seems to us so much more mysterious than
space. We know nothing about the intrinsic nature of space, and so
it is quite easy to conceive it satisfactorily. We have intimate
acquaintance with the nature of time and so it baffles our
comprehension. It is the same paradox which makes us believe we
understand the nature of an ordinary table whereas the nature of
human personality is altogether mysterious. We never have that
intimate contact with space and tables which would make us realise
how mysterious they are; we have direct knowledge of time and of
the human spirit which makes us reject as inadequate that merely
symbolic conception of the world which is so often mistaken for an
insight into its nature.

The Four-Dimensional World. I do not know whether you have been

keenly alive to the fact that for some time now we have been
immersed in a four-dimensional world. The fourth dimension
required no introduction; as soon as we began to consider events it
was there. Events obviously have a fourfold order which we can
dissect into right or left, behind or in front, above or below, sooner
or later—or into many alternative sets of fourfold specification. The
fourth dimension is not a difficult conception. It is not difficult to
conceive of events as ordered in four dimensions; it is impossible to
conceive them otherwise. The trouble begins when we continue
farther along this line of thought, because by long custom we have
divided the world of events into three-dimensional sections or
instants, and regarded the piling of the instants as something
distinct from a dimension. That gives us the usual conception of a
three-dimensional world floating in the stream of time. This
pampering of a particular dimension is not entirely without
foundation; it is our crude appreciation of the absolute separation of
space-relations and time-relations by the hour-glass figures. But the
crude discrimination has to be replaced by a more accurate
discrimination. The supposed planes of structure represented by
Now lines separated one dimension from the other three; but the
cones of structure given by the hour-glass figures keep the four
dimensions firmly pinned together.[3]
We are accustomed to think of a man apart from his duration.
When I portrayed “Myself” in Fig. 2, you were for the moment
surprised that I should include my boyhood and old age. But to think
of a man without his duration is just as abstract as to think of a man
without his inside. Abstractions are useful, and a man without his
inside (that is to say, a surface) is a well-known geometrical
conception. But we ought to realise what is an abstraction and what
is not. The “four-dimensional worms” introduced in this chapter
seem to many people terribly abstract. Not at all; they are unfamiliar
conceptions but not abstract conceptions. It is the section of the
worm (the man Now) which is an abstraction. And as sections may
be taken in somewhat different directions, the abstraction is made
differently by different observers who accordingly attribute different
FitzGerald contractions to it. The non-abstract man enduring through
time is the common source from which the different abstractions are
made.
The appearance of a four-dimensional world in this subject is due
to Minkowski. Einstein showed the relativity of the familiar quantities
of physics; Minkowski showed how to recover the absolute by going
back to their four-dimensional origin and searching more deeply.

The Velocity of Light. A feature of the relativity theory which seems

to have aroused special interest among philosophers is the
absoluteness of the velocity of light. In general velocity is relative. If
I speak of a velocity of 40 kilometres a second I must add “relative
to the earth”, “relative to Arcturus”, or whatever reference body I
have in mind. No one will understand anything from my statement
unless this is added or implied. But it is a curious fact that if I speak
of a velocity of 299,796 kilometres a second it is unnecessary to add
the explanatory phrase. Relative to what? Relative to any and every
star or particle of matter in the universe.
It is no use trying to overtake a flash of light; however fast you
go it is always travelling away from you at 186,000 miles a second.
Now from one point of view this is a rather unworthy deception that
Nature has practised upon us. Let us take our favourite observer
who travels at 161,000 miles a second and send him in pursuit of
the flash of light. It is going 25,000 miles a second faster than he is;
but that is not what he will report. Owing to the contraction of his
standard scale his miles are only half-miles; owing to the slowing
down of his clocks his seconds are double-seconds. His
measurements would therefore make the speed 100,000 miles a
second (really half-miles per double-second). He makes a further
mistake in synchronising the clocks with which he records the
velocity. (You will remember that he uses a different Now line from
ours). This brings the speed up to 186,000 miles a second. From his
own point of view the traveller is lagging hopelessly behind the light;
he does not realise what a close race he is making of it, because his
measuring appliances have been upset. You will note that the
evasiveness of the light-flash is not in the least analogous to the
evasiveness of the rainbow.
But although this explanation may help to reconcile us to what at
first seems a blank impossibility, it is not really the most penetrating.
You will remember that a Seen-Now line, or track of a flash of light,
represents the grain of the world-structure. Thus the peculiarity of a
velocity of 299,796 kilometres a second is that it coincides with the
grain of the world. The four-dimensional worms representing
material bodies must necessarily run across the grain into the future
cone, and we have to introduce some kind of reference frame to
describe their course. But the flash of light is exactly along the grain,
and there is no need of any artificial system of partitions to describe
this fact.
The number 299,796 (kilometres per second) is, so to speak, a
code-number for the grain of the wood. Other code-numbers
correspond to the various worm-holes which may casually cross the
grain. We have different codes corresponding to different frames of
space and time; the code-number of the grain of the wood is the
only one which is the same in all codes. This is no accident; but I do
not know that any deep inference is to be drawn from it, other than
that our measure-codes have been planned rationally so as to turn
on the essential and not on the casual features of world-structure.
The speed of 299,796 kilometres per second which occupies a
unique position in every measure-system is commonly referred to as
the speed of light. But it is much more than that; it is the speed at
which the mass of matter becomes infinite, lengths contract to zero,
clocks stand still. Therefore it crops up in all kinds of problems
whether light is concerned or not.
The scientist’s interest in the absoluteness of this velocity is very
great; the philosopher’s interest has been, I think, largely a mistaken
interest. In asserting its absoluteness scientists mean that they have
assigned the same number to it in every measure-system; but that is
a private arrangement of their own—an unwitting compliment to its
universal importance.[4] Turning from the measure-numbers to the
thing described by them, the “grain” is certainly an absolute feature
of the wood, but so also are the “worm-holes” (material particles).
The difference is that the grain is essential and universal, the worm-
holes casual. Science and philosophy have often been at cross-
purposes in discussing the Absolute—a misunderstanding which is I
am afraid chiefly the fault of the scientists. In science we are chiefly
concerned with the absoluteness or relativity of the descriptive terms
we employ; but when the term absolute is used with reference to
that which is being described it has generally the loose meaning of
“universal” as opposed to “casual”.
Another point on which there has sometimes been a
misunderstanding is the existence of a superior limit to velocity. It is
not permissible to say that no velocity can exceed 299,796
kilometres per second. For example, imagine a search-light capable
of sending an accurately parallel beam as far as Neptune. If the
search-light is made to revolve once a minute, Neptune’s end of the
beam will move round a circle with velocity far greater than the
above limit. This is an example of our habit of creating velocities by
a mental association of states which are not themselves in direct
causal connection. The assertion made by the relativity theory is
more restricted, viz.—
Neither matter, nor energy, nor anything capable of being used
as a signal can travel faster than 299,796 kilometres per second,
provided that the velocity is referred to one of the frames of space
and time considered in this chapter.[5]
 The velocity of light in matter can under certain circumstances (in
the phenomenon of anomalous dispersion) exceed this value. But
the higher velocity is only attained after the light has been passing
through the matter for some moments so as to set the molecules in
sympathetic vibration. An unheralded light-flash travels more slowly.
The speed, exceeding 299,796 kilometres a second, is, so to speak,
achieved by prearrangement, and has no application in signalling.
We are bound to insist on this limitation of the speed of
signalling. It has the effect that it is only possible to signal into the
Absolute Future. The consequences of being able to transmit
messages concerning events Here-Now into the neutral wedge are
too bizarre to contemplate. Either the part of the neutral wedge that
can be reached by the signals must be restricted in a way which
violates the principle of relativity; or it will be possible to arrange for
a confederate to receive the messages which we shall send him to-
morrow, and to retransmit them to us so that we receive them to-
day! The limit to the velocity of signals is our bulwark against that
topsy-turvydom of past and future, of which Einstein’s theory is
sometimes wrongfully accused.
Expressed in the conventional way this limitation of the speed of
signalling to 299,796 kilometres a second seems a rather arbitrary
decree of Nature. We almost feel it as a challenge to find something
that goes faster. But if we state it in the absolute form that signalling
is only possible along a track of temporal relation and not along a
track of spatial relation the restriction seems rational. To violate it we
have not merely to find something which goes just 1 kilometre per
second better, but something which overleaps that distinction of time
and space—which, we are all convinced, ought to be maintained in
any sensible theory.

Practical Applications. In these lectures I am concerned more with

the ideas of the new theories than with their practical importance for
the advancement of science. But the drawback of dwelling solely on
the underlying conceptions is that it is likely to give the impression
that the new physics is very much “up in the air”. That is by no
means true, and the relativity theory is used in a businesslike way in
the practical problems to which it applies. I can only consider here
quite elementary problems which scarcely do justice to the power of
the new theory in advanced scientific research. Two examples must
suffice.
1. It has often been suggested that the stars will be retarded by
the back-pressure of their own radiation. The idea is that since the
star is moving forward the emitted radiation is rather heaped up in
front of it and thinned out behind. Since radiation exerts pressure
the pressure will be stronger on the front surface than on the rear.
Therefore there is a force retarding the star tending to bring it
gradually to rest. The effect might be of great importance in the
study of stellar motions; it would mean that on the average old stars
must have lower speeds than young stars—a conclusion which, as it
happens, is contrary to observation.
But according to the theory of relativity “coming to rest” has no
meaning. A decrease of velocity relative to one frame is an increase
relative to another frame. There is no absolute velocity and no
absolute rest for the star to come to. The suggestion may therefore
be at once dismissed as fallacious.
2. The particles shot out by radioactive substances are
electrons travelling at speeds not much below the speed of light.
Experiment shows that the mass of one of these high-speed
electrons is considerably greater than the mass of an electron at
rest. The theory of relativity predicts this increase and provides the
formula for the dependence of mass on velocity. The increase arises
solely from the fact that mass is a relative quantity depending by
definition on the relative quantities length and time.
Let us look at a particle from its own point of view. It is an
ordinary electron in no wise different from any other. But is it
travelling with unusually high speed? “No”, says the electron, “That
is your point of view. I contemplate with amazement your
extraordinary speed of 100,000 miles a second with which you are
shooting past me. I wonder what it feels like to move so quickly.
However, it is no business of mine.” So the particle, smugly
thinking itself at rest, pays no attention to our goings on, and
arranges itself with the usual mass, radius and charge. It has just
the standard mass of an electron, . But mass and
radius are relative quantities, and in this case the frame to which
they are referred is evidently the frame appropriate to an electron
engaged in self-contemplation, viz. the frame in which it is at rest.
But when we talk about mass we refer it to the frame in which we
are at rest. By the geometry of the four-dimensional world we can
calculate the formulae for the change of reckoning of mass in two
different frames, which is consequential on the change of reckoning
of length and time; we find in fact that the mass is increased in the
same ratio as the length is diminished (FitzGerald factor). The
increase of mass that we observe arises from the change of
reckoning between the electron’s own frame and our frame.
All electrons are alike from their own point of view. The apparent
differences arise in fitting them into our own frame of reference
which is irrelevant to their structure. Our reckoning of their mass is
higher than their own reckoning, and increases with the difference
between our respective frames, i.e. with the relative velocity
between us.
We do not bring forward these results to demonstrate or confirm
the truth of the theory, but to show the use of the theory. They can
both be deduced from the classical electromagnetic theory of
Maxwell coupled (in the second problem) with certain plausible
assumptions as to the conditions holding at the surface of an
electron. But to realise the advantage of the new theory we must
consider not what could have been but what was deduced from the
classical theory. The historical fact is that the conclusions of the
classical theory as to the first problem were wrong; an important
compensating factor escaped notice. Its conclusions as to the
second problem were (after some false starts) entirely correct
numerically. But since the result was deduced from the
electromagnetic equations of the electron it was thought that it
depended on the fact that an electron is an electrical structure; and
the agreement with observation was believed to confirm the
hypothesis that an electron is pure electricity and nothing else. Our
treatment above makes no reference to any electrical properties of
the electron, the phenomenon having been found to arise solely
from the relativity of mass. Hence, although there may be other
good reasons for believing that an electron consists solely of
negative electricity, the increase of mass with velocity is no evidence
one way or the other.

In this chapter the idea of a multiplicity of frames of space has

been extended to a multiplicity of frames of space and time. The
system of location in space, called a frame of space, is only a part of
a fuller system of location of events in space and time. Nature
provides no indication that one of these frames is to be preferred to
the others. The particular frame in which we are relatively at rest
has a symmetry with respect to us which other frames do not
possess, and for this reason we have drifted into the common
assumption that it is the only reasonable and proper frame; but this
egocentric outlook should now be abandoned, and all frames treated
as on the same footing. By considering time and space together we
have been able to understand how the multiplicity of frames arises.
They correspond to different directions of section of the four-
dimensional world of events, the sections being the “world-wide
instants”. Simultaneity (Now) is seen to be relative. The denial of
absolute simultaneity is intimately connected with the denial of
absolute velocity; knowledge of absolute velocity would enable us to
assert that certain events in the past or future occur Here but not
Now; knowledge of absolute simultaneity would tell us that certain
events occur Now but not Here. Removing these artificial sections,
we have had a glimpse of the absolute world-structure with its grain
diverging and interlacing after the plan of the hour-glass figures. By
reference to this structure we discern an absolute distinction
between space-like and time-like separation of events—a distinction
which justifies and explains our instinctive feeling that space and
time are fundamentally different. Many of the important applications
of the new conceptions to the practical problems of physics are too
technical to be considered in this book; one of the simpler
applications is to determine the changes of the physical properties of
objects due to rapid motion. Since the motion can equally well be
described as a motion of ourselves relative to the object or of the
object relative to ourselves, it cannot influence the absolute
behaviour of the object. The apparent changes in the length, mass,
electric and magnetic fields, period of vibration, etc., are merely a
change of reckoning introduced in passing from the frame in which
the object is at rest to the frame in which the observer is at rest.
Formulae for calculating the change of reckoning of any of these
quantities are easily deduced now that the geometrical relation of
the frames has been ascertained.
[2] The measured velocity of light is the average to-and-fro
velocity. The velocity in one direction singly cannot be measured
until after the Now lines have been laid down and therefore
cannot be used in laying down the Now lines. Thus there is a
deadlock in drawing the Now lines which can only be removed by
an arbitrary assumption or convention. The convention actually
adopted is that (relative to the observer) the velocities of light in
the two opposite directions are equal. The resulting Now lines
must therefore be regarded as equally conventional.
[3] In Fig. 4 the scale is such that a second of time corresponds
to 70,000 miles of space. If we take a more ordinary scale of
experience, say a second to a yard, the Seen-Now lines become
almost horizontal; and it will easily be understood why the cones
which pin the four dimensions together have generally been
mistaken for sections separating them.
[4] In the general relativity theory (chapter VI) measure-systems
are employed in which the velocity of light is no longer assigned
the same constant value, but it continues to correspond to the
grain of absolute world-structure.
[5] Some proviso of this kind is clearly necessary. We often
employ for special purposes a frame of reference rotating with the
earth; in this frame the stars describe circles once a day, and are
therefore ascribed enormous velocities.
 Chapter IV
THE RUNNING-DOWN OF THE
UNIVERSE
Shuffling. The modern outlook on the physical world is not
composed exclusively of conceptions which have arisen in the last
twenty-five years; and we have now to deal with a group of ideas
dating far back in the last century which have not essentially altered
since the time of Boltzmann. These ideas display great activity and
development at the present time. The subject is relevant at this
stage because it has a bearing on the deeper aspects of the problem
of Time; but it is so fundamental in physical theory that we should
be bound to deal with it sooner or later in any comprehensive
survey.
If you take a pack of cards as it comes from the maker and
shuffle it for a few minutes, all trace of the original systematic order
disappears. The order will never come back however long you
shuffle. Something has been done which cannot be undone, namely,
the introduction of a random element in place of arrangement.
Illustrations may be useful even when imperfect, and therefore I
have slurred over two points, which affect the illustration rather than
the application which we are about to make. It was scarcely true to
say that the shuffling cannot be undone. You can sort out the cards
into their original order if you like. But in considering the shuffling
which occurs in the physical world we are not troubled by a deus ex
machina like you. I am not prepared to say how far the human mind
is bound by the conclusions we shall reach. So I exclude you—at
least I exclude that activity of your mind which you employ in sorting
the cards. I allow you to shuffle them because you can do that
absent-mindedly.
Secondly, it is not quite true that the original order never comes
back. There is a ghost of a chance that some day a thoroughly
shuffled pack will be found to have come back to the original order.
That is because of the comparatively small number of cards in the
pack. In our applications the units are so numerous that this kind of
contingency can be disregarded.
We shall put forward the contention that—
Whenever anything happens which cannot be undone, it is
always reducible to the introduction of a random element analogous
to that introduced by shuffling.
Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.
When Humpty Dumpty had a great fall—

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Something had happened which could not be undone. The fall

could have been undone. It is not necessary to invoke the king’s
horses and the king’s men; if there had been a perfectly elastic mat
underneath, that would have sufficed. At the end of his fall Humpty
Dumpty had kinetic energy which, properly directed, was just
sufficient to bounce him back on to the wall again. But, the elastic
mat being absent, an irrevocable event happened at the end of the
fall—namely, the introduction of a random element into Humpty
Dumpty.
But why should we suppose that shuffling is the only process that
cannot be undone?

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety and Wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a Line.
 When there is no shuffling, is the Moving Finger stayed? The
answer of physics is unhesitatingly Yes. To judge of this we must
examine those operations of Nature in which no increase of the
random element can possibly occur. These fall into two groups.
Firstly, we can study those laws of Nature which control the
behaviour of a single unit. Clearly no shuffling can occur in these
problems; you cannot take the King of Spades away from the pack
and shuffle him. Secondly, we can study the processes of Nature in a
crowd which is already so completely shuffled that there is no room
for any further increase of the random element. If our contention is
right, everything that occurs in these conditions is capable of being
undone. We shall consider the first condition immediately; the
second must be deferred until p. 78.
Any change occurring to a body which can be treated as a single
unit can be undone. The laws of Nature admit of the undoing as
easily as of the doing. The earth describing its orbit is controlled by
laws of motion and of gravitation; these admit of the earth’s actual
motion, but they also admit of the precisely opposite motion. In the
same field of force the earth could retrace its steps; it merely
depends on how it was started off. It may be objected that we have
no right to dismiss the starting-off as an inessential part of the
problem; it may be as much a part of the coherent scheme of Nature
as the laws controlling the subsequent motion. Indeed, astronomers
have theories explaining why the eight planets all started to move
the same way round the sun. But that is a problem of eight planets,
not of a single individual—a problem of the pack, not of the isolated
card. So long as the earth’s motion is treated as an isolated problem,
no one would dream of putting into the laws of Nature a clause
requiring that it must go this way round and not the opposite.
There is a similar reversibility of motion in fields of electric and
magnetic force. Another illustration can be given from atomic
physics. The quantum laws admit of the emission of certain kinds
and quantities of light from an atom; these laws also admit of
absorption of the same kinds and quantities, i.e. the undoing of the
emission. I apologise for an apparent poverty of illustration; it must
be remembered that many properties of a body, e.g. temperature,
refer to its constitution as a large number of separate atoms, and
therefore the laws controlling temperature cannot be regarded as
controlling the behaviour of a single individual.
The common property possessed by laws governing the
individual can be stated more clearly by a reference to time. A
certain sequence of states running from past to future is the doing
of an event; the same sequence running from future to past is the
undoing of it—because in the latter case we turn round the
sequence so as to view it in the accustomed manner from past to
future. So if the laws of Nature are indifferent as to the doing and
undoing of an event, they must be indifferent as to a direction of
time from past to future. That is their common feature, and it is
seen at once when (as usual) the laws are formulated
mathematically. There is no more distinction between past and
future than between right and left. In algebraic symbolism, left is
, right is ; past is , future is . This holds for all laws of
Nature governing the behaviour of non-composite individuals—the
“primary laws”, as we shall call them. There is only one law of
Nature—the second law of thermodynamics—which recognises a
distinction between past and future more profound than the
difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest. But
this law has no application to the behaviour of a single individual,
and as we shall see later its subject-matter is the random element in
a crowd.
Whatever the primary laws of physics may say, it is obvious to
ordinary experience that there is a distinction between past and
future of a different kind from the distinction of left and right. In The
Plattner Story H. G. Wells relates how a man strayed into the fourth
dimension and returned with left and right interchanged. But we
notice that this interchange is not the theme of the story; it is
merely a corroborative detail to give an air of verisimilitude to the
adventure. In itself the change is so trivial that even Mr. Wells
cannot weave a romance out of it. But if the man had come back
with past and future interchanged, then indeed the situation would
have been lively. Mr. Wells in The Time-Machine and Lewis Carroll in
Sylvie and Bruno give us a glimpse of the absurdities which occur
when time runs backwards. If space is “looking-glassed” the world
continues to make sense; but looking-glassed time has an inherent
absurdity which turns the world-drama into the most nonsensical
farce.
Now the primary laws of physics taken one by one all declare
that they are entirely indifferent as to which way you consider time
to be progressing, just as they are indifferent as to whether you
view the world from the right or the left. This is true of the classical
laws, the relativity laws, and even of the quantum laws. It is not an
accidental property; the reversibility is inherent in the whole
conceptual scheme in which these laws find a place. Thus the
question whether the world does or does not “make sense” is
outside the range of these laws. We have to appeal to the one
outstanding law—the second law of thermodynamics—to put some
sense into the world. It opens up a new province of knowledge,
namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with
organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between
doing and undoing appears for the first time.

Time’s Arrow. The great thing about time is that it goes on. But this
is an aspect of it which the physicist sometimes seems inclined to
neglect. In the four-dimensional world considered in the last chapter
the events past and future lie spread out before us as in a map. The
events are there in their proper spatial and temporal relation; but
there is no indication that they undergo what has been described as
“the formality of taking place”, and the question of their doing or
undoing does not arise. We see in the map the path from past to
future or from future to past; but there is no signboard to indicate
that it is a one-way street. Something must be added to the
geometrical conceptions comprised in Minkowski’s world before it
becomes a complete picture of the world as we know it. We may
appeal to consciousness to suffuse the whole—to turn existence into
happening, being into becoming. But first let us note that the picture
as it stands is entirely adequate to represent those primary laws of
Nature which, as we have seen, are indifferent to a direction of time.
Objection has sometimes been felt to the relativity theory because
its four-dimensional picture of the world seems to overlook the
directed character of time. The objection is scarcely logical, for the
theory is in this respect no better and no worse than its
predecessors. The classical physicist has been using without
misgiving a system of laws which do not recognise a directed time;
he is shocked that the new picture should expose this so glaringly.
Without any mystic appeal to consciousness it is possible to find
a direction of time on the four-dimensional map by a study of
organisation. Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the
arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of
the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the
random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That
is the only distinction known to physics. This follows at once if our
fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of
randomness is the only thing which cannot be undone.
I shall use the phrase “time’s arrow” to express this one-way
property of time which has no analogue in space. It is a singularly
interesting property from a philosophical standpoint. We must note
that—
(1) It is vividly recognised by consciousness.
(2) It is equally insisted on by our reasoning faculty, which tells
us that a reversal of the arrow would render the external world
nonsensical.
(3) It makes no appearance in physical science except in the
study of organisation of a number of individuals. Here the arrow
indicates the direction of progressive increase of the random
element.
Let us now consider in detail how a random element brings the
irrevocable into the world. When a stone falls it acquires kinetic
energy, and the amount of the energy is just that which would be
required to lift the stone back to its original height. By suitable
arrangements the kinetic energy can be made to perform this task;
for example, if the stone is tied to a string it can alternately fall and
reascend like a pendulum. But if the stone hits an obstacle its kinetic
energy is converted into heat-energy. There is still the same quantity
of energy, but even if we could scrape it together and put it through
an engine we could not lift the stone back with it. What has
happened to make the energy no longer serviceable?
Looking microscopically at the falling stone we see an enormous
multitude of molecules moving downwards with equal and parallel
velocities—an organised motion like the march of a regiment. We
have to notice two things, the energy and the organisation of the
energy. To return to its original height the stone must preserve both
of them.
When the stone falls on a sufficiently elastic surface the motion
may be reversed without destroying the organisation. Each molecule
is turned backwards and the whole array retires in good order to the
starting-point—

The famous Duke of York

With twenty thousand men,
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And marched them down again.

History is not made that way. But what usually happens at the
impact is that the molecules suffer more or less random collisions
and rebound in all directions. They no longer conspire to make
progress in any one direction; they have lost their organisation.
Afterwards they continue to collide with one another and keep
changing their directions of motion, but they never again find a
common purpose. Organisation cannot be brought about by
continued shuffling. And so, although the energy remains
quantitatively sufficient (apart from unavoidable leakage which we
suppose made good), it cannot lift the stone back. To restore the
stone we must supply extraneous energy which has the required
amount of organisation.
Here a point arises which unfortunately has no analogy in the
shuffling of a pack of cards. No one (except a conjurer) can throw
two half-shuffled packs into a hat and draw out one pack in its
original order and one pack fully shuffled. But we can and do put
partly disorganised energy into a steam-engine, and draw it out
again partly as fully organised energy of motion of massive bodies
and partly as heat-energy in a state of still worse disorganisation.
Organisation of energy is negotiable, and so is the disorganisation or
random element; disorganisation does not for ever remain attached
to the particular store of energy which first suffered it, but may be
passed on elsewhere. We cannot here enter into the question why
there should be a difference between the shuffling of energy and the
shuffling of material objects; but it is necessary to use some caution
in applying the analogy on account of this difference. As regards
heat-energy the temperature is the measure of its degree of
organisation; the lower the temperature, the greater the
disorganisation.

Coincidences. There are such things as chance coincidences; that is

to say, chance can deceive us by bringing about conditions which
look very unlike chance. In particular chance might imitate
organisation, whereas we have taken organisation to be the
antithesis of chance or, as we have called it, the “random element”.
This threat to our conclusions is, however, not very serious. There is
safety in numbers.
Suppose that you have a vessel divided by a partition into two
halves, one compartment containing air and the other empty. You
withdraw the partition. For the moment all the molecules of air are
in one half of the vessel; a fraction of a second later they are spread
over the whole vessel and remain so ever afterwards. The molecules
will not return to one half of the vessel; the spreading cannot be
undone—unless other material is introduced into the problem to
serve as a scapegoat for the disorganisation and carry off the
random element elsewhere. This occurrence can serve as a criterion
to distinguish past and future time. If you observe first the
molecules spread through the vessel and (as it seems to you) an
instant later the molecules all in one half of it—then your
consciousness is going backwards, and you had better consult a
doctor.
Now each molecule is wandering round the vessel with no
preference for one part rather than the other. On the average it
spends half its time in one compartment and half in the other. There
is a faint possibility that at one moment all the molecules might in
this way happen to be visiting the one half of the vessel. You will
easily calculate that if is the number of molecules (roughly a

quadrillion) the chance of this happening is . The reason

why we ignore this chance may be seen by a rather classical

illustration. If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a
typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible
sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters
they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of
their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the
molecules returning to one half of the vessel.
When numbers are large, chance is the best warrant for
certainty. Happily in the study of molecules and energy and radiation
in bulk we have to deal with a vast population, and we reach a
certainty which does not always reward the expectations of those
who court the fickle goddess.
In one sense the chance of the molecules returning to one half of
the vessel is too absurdly small to think about. Yet in science we
think about it a great deal, because it gives a measure of the
irrevocable mischief we did when we casually removed the partition.
Even if we had good reasons for wanting the gas to fill the vessel
there was no need to waste the organisation; as we have
mentioned, it is negotiable and might have been passed on
somewhere where it was useful.[6] When the gas was released and
began to spread across the vessel, say from left to right, there was
no immediate increase of the random element. In order to spread
from left to right, left-to-right velocities of the molecules must have
preponderated, that is to say the motion was partly organised.
Organisation of position was replaced by organisation of motion. A
moment later the molecules struck the farther wall of the vessel and
the random element began to increase. But, before it was destroyed,
the left-to-right organisation of molecular velocities was the exact
numerical equivalent of the lost organisation in space. By that we
mean that the chance against the left-to-right preponderance of
velocity occurring by accident is the same as the chance against
segregation in one half of the vessel occurring by accident.
The adverse chance here mentioned is a preposterous number
which (written in the usual decimal notation) would fill all the books
in the world many times over. We are not interested in it as a
practical contingency; but we are interested in the fact that it is
definite. It raises “organisation” from a vague descriptive epithet to
one of the measurable quantities of exact science. We are
confronted with many kinds of organisation. The uniform march of a
regiment is not the only form of organised motion; the organised
evolutions of a stage chorus have their natural analogue in sound
waves. A common measure can now be applied to all forms of
organisation. Any loss of organisation is equitably measured by the
chance against its recovery by an accidental coincidence. The chance
is absurd regarded as a contingency, but it is precise as a measure.
The practical measure of the random element which can increase
in the universe but can never decrease is called entropy. Measuring
by entropy is the same as measuring by the chance explained in the
last paragraph, only the unmanageably large numbers are
transformed (by a simple formula) into a more convenient scale of
reckoning. Entropy continually increases. We can, by isolating parts
of the world and postulating rather idealised conditions in our
problems, arrest the increase, but we cannot turn it into a decrease.
That would involve something much worse than a violation of an
ordinary law of Nature, namely, an improbable coincidence. The law
that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—
holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If
someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in
disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for
Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation
—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if
your theory is found to be against the second law of
thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but
to collapse in deepest humiliation. This exaltation of the second law
is not unreasonable. There are other laws which we have strong
reason to believe in, and we feel that a hypothesis which violates
them is highly improbable; but the improbability is vague and does
not confront us as a paralysing array of figures, whereas the chance
against a breach of the second law (i.e. against a decrease of the
random element) can be stated in figures which are overwhelming.
I wish I could convey to you the amazing power of this
conception of entropy in scientific research. From the property that
entropy must always increase, practical methods of measuring it
have been found. The chain of deductions from this simple law have
been almost illimitable; and it has been equally successful in
connection with the most recondite problems of theoretical physics
and the practical tasks of the engineer. Its special feature is that the
conclusions are independent of the nature of the microscopical
processes that are going on. It is not concerned with the nature of
the individual; it is interested in him only as a component of a
crowd. Therefore the method is applicable in fields of research
where our ignorance has scarcely begun to lift, and we have no
hesitation in applying it to problems of the quantum theory, although
the mechanism of the individual quantum process is unknown and at
present unimaginable.
Primary and Secondary Law. I have called the laws controlling the
behaviour of single individuals “primary laws”, implying that the
second law of thermodynamics, although a recognised law of
Nature, is in some sense a secondary law. This distinction can now
be placed on a regular footing. Some things never happen in the
physical world because they are impossible; others because they are
too improbable. The laws which forbid the first are the primary laws;
the laws which forbid the second are the secondary laws. It has
been the conviction of nearly all physicists[7] that at the root of
everything there is a complete scheme of primary law governing the
career of every particle or constituent of the world with an iron
determinism. This primary scheme is all-sufficing, for, since it fixes
the history of every constituent of the world, it fixes the whole
world-history.
But for all its completeness primary law does not answer every
question about Nature which we might reasonably wish to put. Can
a universe evolve backwards, i.e. develop in the opposite way to our
own system? Primary law, being indifferent to a time-direction,
replies, “Yes, it is not impossible”. Secondary law replies, “No, it is
too improbable”. The answers are not really in conflict; but the first,
though true, rather misses the point. This is typical of some much
more commonplace queries. If I put this saucepan of water on this
fire, will the water boil? Primary law can answer definitely if it is
given the chance; but it must be understood that “this” translated
into mathematics means a specification of the positions, motions,
etc., of some quadrillions of particles and elements of energy. So in
practice the question answered is not quite the one that is asked: If
I put a saucepan resembling this one in a few major respects on a
fire, will the water boil? Primary law replies, “It may boil; it may
freeze; it may do pretty well anything. The details given are
insufficient to exclude any result as impossible.” Secondary law
replies plainly, “It will boil because it is too improbable that it should
do anything else.” Secondary law is not in conflict with primary law,
nor can we regard it as essential to complete a scheme of law
already complete in itself. It results from a different (and rather
more practical) conception of the aim of our traffic with the secrets
of Nature.
The question whether the second law of thermodynamics and
other statistical laws are mathematical deductions from the primary
laws, presenting their results in a conveniently usable form, is
difficult to answer; but I think it is generally considered that there is
an unbridgeable hiatus. At the bottom of all the questions settled by
secondary law there is an elusive conception of “a priori probability
of states of the world” which involves an essentially different attitude
to knowledge from that presupposed in the construction of the
scheme of primary law.

Thermodynamical Equilibrium. Progress of time introduces more and

more of the random element into the constitution of the world.
There is less of chance about the physical universe to-day than there
will be to-morrow. It is curious that in this very matter-of-fact branch
of physics, developed primarily because of its importance for
engineers, we can scarcely avoid expressing ourselves in teleological
language. We admit that the world contains both chance and design,
or at any rate chance and the antithesis of chance. This antithesis is
emphasised by our method of measurement of entropy; we assign
to the organisation or non-chance element a measure which is, so to
speak, proportional to the strength of our disbelief in a chance origin
for it. “A fortuitous concourse of atoms”—that bugbear of the
theologian—has a very harmless place in orthodox physics. The
physicist is acquainted with it as a much-prized rarity. Its properties
are very distinctive, and unlike those of the physical world in
general. The scientific name for a fortuitous concourse of atoms is
“thermodynamical equilibrium”.
Thermodynamical equilibrium is the other case which we
promised to consider in which no increase in the random element
can occur, namely, that in which the shuffling is already as thorough
as possible. We must isolate a region of the universe, arranging that
no energy can enter or leave it, or at least that any boundary effects
are precisely compensated. The conditions are ideal, but they can be
reproduced with sufficient approximation to make the ideal problem
relevant to practical experiment. A region in the deep interior of a
star is an almost perfect example of thermodynamical equilibrium.
Under these isolated conditions the energy will be shuffled as it is
bandied from matter to aether and back again, and very soon the
shuffling will be complete.
The possibility of the shuffling becoming complete is significant.
If after shuffling the pack you tear each card in two, a further
shuffling of the half-cards becomes possible. Tear the cards again
and again; each time there is further scope for the random element
to increase. With infinite divisibility there can be no end to the
shuffling. The experimental fact that a definite state of equilibrium is
rapidly reached indicates that energy is not infinitely divisible, or at
least that it is not infinitely divided in the natural processes of
shuffling. Historically this is the result from which the quantum
theory first arose. We shall return to it in a later chapter.
In such a region we lose time’s arrow. You remember that the
arrow points in the direction of increase of the random element.
When the random element has reached its limit and become steady
the arrow does not know which way to point. It would not be true to
say that such a region is timeless; the atoms vibrate as usual like
little clocks; by them we can measure speeds and durations. Time is
still there and retains its ordinary properties, but it has lost its arrow;
like space it extends, but it does not “go on”.
This raises the important question, Is the random element
(measured by the criterion of probability already discussed) the only
feature of the physical world which can furnish time with an arrow?
Up to the present we have concluded that no arrow can be found
from the behaviour of isolated individuals, but there is scope for
further search among the properties of crowds beyond the property
represented by entropy. To give an illustration which is perhaps not
quite so fantastic as it sounds, Might not the assemblage become
more and more beautiful (according to some agreed aesthetic
standard) as time proceeds?[8] The question is answered by another
important law of Nature which runs—
Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage can distinguish a
direction of time when entropy fails to distinguish one.
I think that although this law was only discovered in the last few
years there is no serious doubt as to its truth. It is accepted as
fundamental in all modern studies of atoms and radiation and has
proved to be one of the most powerful weapons of progress in such
researches. It is, of course, one of the secondary laws. It does not
seem to be rigorously deducible from the second law of
thermodynamics, and presumably must be regarded as an additional
secondary law.[9]
The conclusion is that whereas other statistical characters
besides entropy might perhaps be used to discriminate time’s arrow,
they can only succeed when it succeeds and they fail when it fails.
Therefore they cannot be regarded as independent tests. So far as
physics is concerned time’s arrow is a property of entropy alone.

Are Space and Time Infinite? I suppose that everyone has at some
time plagued his imagination with the question, Is there an end to
space? If space comes to an end, what is beyond the end? On the
other hand the idea that there is no end, but space beyond space for
ever, is inconceivable. And so the imagination is tossed to and fro in
a dilemma. Prior to the relativity theory the orthodox view was that
space is infinite. No one can conceive infinite space; we had to be
content to admit in the physical world an inconceivable conception—
disquieting but not necessarily illogical. Einstein’s theory now offers
a way out of the dilemma. Is space infinite, or does it come to an
end? Neither. Space is finite but it has no end; “finite but
unbounded” is the usual phrase.
Infinite space cannot be conceived by anybody; finite but
unbounded space is difficult to conceive but not impossible. I shall
not expect you to conceive it; but you can try. Think first of a circle;
or, rather, not the circle, but the line forming its circumference. This
is a finite but endless line. Next think of a sphere—the surface of a
sphere—that also is a region which is finite but unbounded. The
surface of this earth never comes to a boundary; there is always
some country beyond the point you have reached; all the same
there is not an infinite amount of room on the earth. Now go one
dimension more; circle, sphere—the next thing. Got that? Now for
the real difficulty. Keep a tight hold of the skin of this hypersphere
and imagine that the inside is not there at all—that the skin exists
without the inside. That is finite but unbounded space.
No; I don’t think you have quite kept hold of the conception. You
overbalanced just at the end. It was not the adding of one more
dimension that was the real difficulty; it was the final taking away of
a dimension that did it. I will tell you what is stopping you. You are
using a conception of space which must have originated many
million years ago and has become rather firmly embedded in human
thought. But the space of physics ought not to be dominated by this
creation of the dawning mind of an enterprising ape. Space is not
necessarily like this conception; it is like—whatever we find from
experiment it is like. Now the features of space which we discover by
experiment are extensions, i.e. lengths and distances. So space is
like a network of distances. Distances are linkages whose intrinsic
nature is inscrutable; we do not deny the inscrutability when we
apply measure numbers to them—2 yards, 5 miles, etc.—as a kind of
code distinction. We cannot predict out of our inner consciousness
the laws by which code-numbers are distributed among the different
linkages of the network, any more than we can predict how the
code-numbers for electromagnetic force are distributed. Both are a
matter for experiment.
If we go a very long way to a point in one direction through
the universe and a very long way to a point in the opposite
direction, it is believed that between and there exists a linkage
of the kind indicated by a very small code-number; in other words
these points reached by travelling vast distances in opposite
directions would be found experimentally to be close together. Why
not? This happens when we travel east and west on the earth. It is
true that our traditional inflexible conception of space refuses to
admit it; but there was once a traditional conception of the earth
which refused to admit circumnavigation. In our approach to the
conception of spherical space the difficult part was to destroy the
inside of the hypersphere leaving only its three-dimensional surface
existing. I do not think that is so difficult when we conceive space as
a network of distances. The network over the surface constitutes a
self-supporting system of linkage which can be contemplated
without reference to extraneous linkages. We can knock away the
constructional scaffolding which helped us to approach the
conception of this kind of network of distances without endangering
the conception.
We must realise that a scheme of distribution of inscrutable
relations linking points to one another is not bound to follow any
particular preconceived plan, so that there can be no obstacle to the
acceptance of any scheme indicated by experiment.
We do not yet know what is the radius of spherical space; it
must, of course, be exceedingly great compared with ordinary
standards. On rather insecure evidence it has been estimated to be
not many times greater than the distance of the furthest known
nebulae. But the boundlessness has nothing to do with the bigness.
Space is boundless by re-entrant form not by great extension. That
which is is a shell floating in the infinitude of that which is not. We
say with Hamlet, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself
a king of infinite space”.
But the nightmare of infinity still arises in regard to time. The
world is closed in its space dimensions like a sphere, but it is open at
both ends in the time dimension. There is a bending round by which
East ultimately becomes West, but no bending by which Before
ultimately becomes After.
I am not sure that I am logical but I cannot feel the difficulty of
an infinite future time very seriously. The difficulty about A.D. will
not happen until we reach A.D. , and presumably in order to
reach A.D. the difficulty must first have been surmounted. It
should also be noted that according to the second law of
thermodynamics the whole universe will reach thermodynamical
equilibrium at a not infinitely remote date in the future. Time’s arrow
will then be lost altogether and the whole conception of progress
towards a future fades away.
But the difficulty of an infinite past is appalling. It is inconceivable
that we are the heirs of an infinite time of preparation; it is not less
inconceivable that there was once a moment with no moment
preceding it.
This dilemma of the beginning of time would worry us more were
it not shut out by another overwhelming difficulty lying between us
and the infinite past. We have been studying the running-down of
the universe; if our views are right, somewhere between the
beginning of time and the present day we must place the winding up
of the universe.
Travelling backwards into the past we find a world with more and
more organisation. If there is no barrier to stop us earlier we must
reach a moment when the energy of the world was wholly organised
with none of the random element in it. It is impossible to go back
any further under the present system of natural law. I do not think
the phrase “wholly organised” begs the question. The organisation
we are concerned with is exactly definable, and there is a limit at
which it becomes perfect. There is not an infinite series of states of
higher and still higher organisation; nor, I think, is the limit one
which is ultimately approached more and more slowly. Complete
organisation does not tend to be more immune from loss than
incomplete organisation.
There is no doubt that the scheme of physics as it has stood for
the last three-quarters of a century postulates a date at which either
the entities of the universe were created in a state of high
organisation, or pre-existing entities were endowed with that
organisation which they have been squandering ever since.
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