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)
The natural question here, of course, is "Well, where are their
time axes?" If you know what to look for, of course, you ought to
be able to perceive them in just the way you perceive ordinary time
intervals--with the reservation that they are imaginary, after all,
just like your space axes, and that you must only expect to see them
in imagination. If you look for a fourth axis in Euclidean three-space
to represent your time axis, you will of course not find it. But you
will by all means agree with me that your time runs in a definite
direction; and this it is that defines your time axis. Einstein adds
that if you and I are in relative motion, my time does not run in
quite the same direction as yours.
How shall we prove it? Well, how would we prove it if he told us that
our space axes did not run in precisely the same direction? Of course
we could not proceed through direct measures upon the axes themselves;
we know these are imaginary. What we should do would be to strike out,
each of us, a very long line indeed in what seemed the true horizontal
direction; and we should hope that if we made them long enough,
and measured them accurately enough, we should be able to detect any
divergence that might exist. This is precisely what we must do with
our time axes if we wish to verify Einstein's statement that they are
not precisely parallel; and what better evidence could we demand of
the truth of this statement than the evidence already presented--that
when we measure our respective time components between two events,
we get different results?
WHAT IT ALL LEADS TO
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