So Revelation speaks
of "there should be time no longer" (hoti chronos ouketi
estai).
The work of the great mathematicians of the nineteenth century--Gauss,
Riemann, Lobatschefsky, Bolyai--offered further evidence that space is
not an empirical deduction from nature, but a conception of the mind, by
showing that various forms of space can be conceived, differing from one
another and from the form in which the mind has cast the events of
nature (the "Euclidean" space). Finally, physical science, in the theory
of relativity, has deduced the same conclusions: space and time do not
exist in nature by themselves, as empty space and empty time, but their
existence is only due to things and events as they occur in nature. They
are relative in the relation between us and the events of nature, so
much so that they are not fixed and invariable in their properties, but
depend upon the observer and the conditions of observation.
We can get an idea of how utterly our perception of nature depends on
the particular form of our time conception by picturing to ourselves how
nature would look if our time perception were 100,000 times faster, or
100,000 times slower.
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