Time

Cognizant that brevities are man's only weapons in his long war with Time, Paul Heymans. Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently perfected a device capable of measuring intervals as small as one-billionth of a second. His method, first conceived by Prof. P. O. Pederson of the University of Copenhagen, consists of the employment of the so-called "Lichtenberg Figures"--phenomena which become manifest when an electric wave is reflected from an electrode. When two electrodes are placed side by side at a given angle, these Lichtenberg Figures will meet, coincide--the moment of their coincidence depending upon the time (unimaginably brief) required by the waves in their passage between the electrodes. So large is the ratio of these Figures that the tiniest fractional divisions of a second may be detected.

By this discovery may be studied a number of arcane reactions which, because of the crudity of moment-measuring contrivances, have never before been accessible to the science of physics. Some of the more obvious of such phenomena are: 1) the difference noticeable in the time of the fall of two bodies of the same shape but of contrasting material, when permitted to fall in a rarified atmosphere; 2) the difference in the time required to transmit sound for a given distance over a radio as compared to a telephone wire.