Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation: A selection of material from the essays submitted in the competition for the Eugene Higgins prize of $5,000Bird, J. Malcolm (James Malcolm)
Philosophy
Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation: A selection of material from the essays submitted in the competition for the Eugene Higgins prize of $5,000
Bird, J. Malcolm (James Malcolm)
Relativity (Physics)
Now the four-dimensional time-space continuum of Minkowski is plainly
of a sort which ought to make susceptible of measurement the separation
between two of its events. We can pass from one element to another
in this continuum--from one event to another--by traversing a path
involving "successive" events. Our very lives consist in doing just
this: we pass from the initial event of our career to the final
event by traversing a path leading us from event to event, changing
our time and space coordinates continuously and simultaneously in the
process. And while we have not been in the habit of measuring anything
except the space interval between two events and the time interval
between two events, separately, I think it is clear enough that,
considered as events, as elements in the world of four dimensions,
there is a less separation between two events that occur in my office
on the same day than between two which occur in my office a year
apart; or between two events occurring 10 minutes apart when both
take place in my office than when one takes place there and one in
London or on Betelgeuse.
It is not at all unreasonable, a priori, then, to seek a numerical
measure for the separation, in space-time of four-dimensions, of
two events. If we find it, we shall doubtless be asked just what
its subjective significance to us is. This must be answered with
some circumspection. It will presumably be something which we cannot
observe with the visual sense alone, or it would have forced itself
upon our attention thousands of years ago. It ought, I should think,
to be something that we would sense by employing at the same time
the visual sense and the sense of time-passage. In fact, I might
very plausibly insist that, by my very remarks about it in the above
paragraph, I have sensed it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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