I'll come running to Thai your Balloon & Doc's a sky sawing Knight W/Talking backward

[alice wellintown]

Pied Beauty & Thai Beauty
It seems that P is up to his old tricks in Ch.15, where the Thai has
Doc talking backward before he smokes it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH-Wxt7msYw

An illustration may help us to understand how much is impossible to
the astronomer as compared with someone who is interested in things on
the surface of the earth. Let us suppose that a drug is administered
to you which makes you temporarily unconscious, and that when you wake
you have lost your memory but not your reasoning powers. Let us
suppose further that while you were unconscious you were carried into
a balloon, which, when you come to, is sailing with the wind on a dark
night - the night of the fifth of November if you are in England, or
of the fourth of July if you are in America. You can see fireworks
which are being sent off from the ground, from trains, and from
aeroplanes traveling in all directions, but you cannot see the ground
or the trains or the aeroplanes because of the darkness. What sort of
picture of the world will you form? You will think that nothing is
permanent: there are only brief flashes of light, which, during their
short existence, travel through the void in the most various and
bizarre curves. You cannot touch these flashes of light, you can only
see them. Obviously your geometry and your physics and your
metaphysics will be quite different from those of ordinary mortals. If
an ordinary mortal were with you in the balloon, you would find his
speech unintelligible. But if Einstein were with you, you would
understand him more easily than the ordinary mortal would, because you
would be free from a host of preconceptions which prevent most people
from understanding him. The theory of relativity depends, to a
considerable extent, upon getting rid of notions which are useful in
ordinary life but not to our drugged balloonist. Circumstances on the
surface of the earth, for various more or less accidental reasons,
suggest conceptions which turn out to be inaccurate, although they
have come to seem like necessities of thought. The most important of
these circumstances is that most objects on the earth's surface are
fairly persistent and nearly stationary from a terrestrial point of
view. If this were not the case, the idea of going on a journey would
not seem so definite as it does. If you want to travel from King's
Cross to Edinburgh, you know that you will find King's Cross where it
has always been, that the railway line will take the course that it
did when you last made the journey, and that Waverley Station in
Edinburgh will not have walked up to the Castle. You therefore say and
think that you have traveled to Edinburgh, not that Edinburgh has
traveled to you, though the latter statement would be just as
accurate. The success of this common-sense point of view depends upon
a number of things which are really of the nature of luck. Suppose all
the houses in London were perpetually moving about, like a swarm of
bees; suppose railways moved and changed their shapes like avalanches;
and finally suppose that material objects were perpetually being
formed and dissolved like clouds. There is nothing impossible in these
suppositions. But obviously what we call a journey to Edinburgh would
have no meaning in such a world. You would begin, no doubt, by asking
the taxi-driver: 'Where is King's Cross this morning?' At the station
you would have to ask a similar question about Edinburgh, but the
booking-office clerk would reply: 'What part of Edinburgh do you mean?
Prince's Street has gone to Glasgow, the Castle has moved up into the
Highlands, and Waverley Station is under water in the middle of the
Firth of Forth.' And on the journey the stations would not be staying
quiet, but some would be travelling north, some south, some east or
west, perhaps much faster than the train. Under these conditions you
could not say where you were at any moment. Indeed the whole notion
that one is always in some definite 'place' is due to the fortunate
immobility of most of the large objects on the earth's surface. The
idea of 'place' is only a rough practical approximation: there is
nothing logically necessary about it, and it cannot be made precise.
If we were not much larger than an electron, we should not have this
impression of stability, which is only due to the grossness of our
senses. King's Cross, which to us looks solid, would be too vast to be
conceived except by a few eccentric mathematicians. The bits of it
that we could see would consist of little tiny points of matter, never
coming into contact with each other, but perpetually whizzing round
each other in an inconceivably rapid ballet-dance. The world of our
experience would be quite as mad as the one in which the different
parts of Edinburgh go for walks in different directions. If - to take
the opposite extreme - you were as large as the sun and lived as long,
with a corresponding slowness of perception, you would again find a
higgledy-piggledy universe without permanence - stars and planets
would come and go like morning mists, and nothing would remain in a
fixed position relatively to anything else. The notion of comparative
stability which forms part of our ordinary outlook is thus due to the
fact that we are about the size we are, and live on a planet of which
the surface is not very hot. If this were not the case, we should not
find pre-relativity physics intellectually satisfying. Indeed we
should never have invented such theories. We should have had to arrive
at relativity physics at one bound, or remain ignorant of scientific
laws.