Is Time Eternal?

Dear Sir:
	Although I disapproved of the change of your readers’ department to Science Discussions, I find that it is still definitely “Brass Tacky,” despite the number of interesting debates raised there.
	I have a couple of ideas which I would like to give other readers the opportunity of blowing holes through.
	First: I’d like to know just how much weight one gains or loses when riding in a high speed elevator, such as is in use in the Empire State Building and similar structures. For instance: suppose an ordinary bath scale were to be placed upon the floor of the elevator. The passenger steps on it and finds that he weighs—he is a rather heavy chap—two hundred pounds. As the elevator starts upward, he is now heavier, since the acceleration allows gravity a greater hold on the subject. As the acceleration ceases—the speed, however, being greater than at the beginning—does the weight of the passenger increase, decrease, remain the same, or does he still weigh two hundred pounds, as he did before entering? Not having an elevator, a tall building, and a bath scale—not to mention a two-hundred-pounder—handy, I am forced to turn the problem over to you and your readers.
	The second is a bit more complicated. Time, we know (or think), is endless, never-ceasing. If every hundred years the earth traveled around the sun one minute quicker than it did the preceding century, and this were kept up for æons on end, the people of earth—providing they lived that long, as a race—would naturally not miss that sixty seconds out of three billion, one hundred and fifty-three million, six hundred thousand seconds. As time goes on, the centuries become successively shorter—till, a very long time hence, they are perhaps only ten years long—one tenth of what they once were. Since this change has been so gradual, and since the people of Earth have been unconsciously adjusting themselves all along, no one will know the difference except the scientists. For the present, however, we will dispense with the scientists and their instruments. Earth folk are now living ten times as fast as they were in 1937. Let us jump further into the future. The century lasts now only five years, now two, now one, now six months, now a week, a day, an hour, a minute—a second! The earth continues its race around the sun, now making its journey in split seconds. Do the Earthians continue to live as heretofore, unaware of the decrease in their year, or do they cease to exist, because time is no more? Think it over.—Richard Wilson, Jr., 86-10 117 St., Richmond Hill, N. Y.