The Project Gutenberg EBook of Unthinkable, by Roger Phillips Graham

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Title: Unthinkable

Author: Roger Phillips Graham

Illustrator: Bill Terry

Release Date: December 11, 2008 [EBook #27491]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: The doctor did a very strange thing; he pulled out a gun
and shot himself through the head.]

UNTHINKABLE

By ROG PHILLIPS

If Nature suddenly began to behave differently, what we consider
obvious and elementary today might become--unthinkable.

In the story THE DESPOILERS in the October 1947 _Amazing Stories_ I
raised the question, "Is there anything absolutely beyond human
comprehension?" In that story I gave humanity a thousand years to give
birth to one man who could comprehend the incomprehensible.

The incomprehensible is harder to portray in a story than is merely the
unknown. If we denote anything incomprehensible by the symbol X, we can
describe what X is to a certain extent by knowing what it is not. We
can, gradually, gain a certain insight into what it is by comparing it
to what IS comprehensible.

In the last analysis the universe of normalcy is incomprehensible. We
have made progress in comprehending it because we have isolated it into
small bundles of events that can be dealt with by the human intellect.

We have arrived at certain basic pictures of the behavior of the
incomprehensible. We have found a certain stability existing in the
picture we have built up. We have searched the heavens and found that
stars are made up of the same elements as the Earth--with a few
exceptions. And with those exceptions we have brought them into the
framework of our picture of the Universe by postulating "dense matter."

We have, slowly, come to the belief that the same laws operate
throughout the entire Universe, just as they do here on the Earth. This
is the Uniformity Postulate.

In that story THE DESPOILERS the Uniformity Postulate was not denied.
The incomprehensible in that story was the m