Page 99 - The Irony Board

Into the Cosmos

Kineticide

Since Einstein has shown
There’s no such thing as
Absolute motion,

Immobility
Also must be an
Obsolete notion.

Just as relativity killed the common sense idea of time, so did it
destroy our assumptions about motion. Again, the eternal backdrop
has been whisked away, leaving no fixed points of reference. In the
6
poem, a pseudohomonymical rhyme emphasizes the rejection of
rigidity repeated throughout the works of the Great Relativist (his
major astrological influences were mutable); even atheism was too
unconditional for his mind. Gluckman’s point is that the corollary of
his proposition may be just as interesting: nothing is not moving!
But motion itself has fallen into a sort of dual definition:
electromagnetic wavicles do not move in the same way that massive
bodies do; the latter are subject to the principle of additive velocities,
while the former are not. Equations never satisfied Gluckman’s
basic question: what’s moving (verb and gerund)?

6
Gluckman’s neologism.
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