The Mathematical Theory of RelativityEddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Science
The Mathematical Theory of Relativity
Eddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Relativity (Physics)
Our minds are immediately aware of a ``flight of time'' without the intervention
of external senses. Presumably there are more or less cyclic processes
occurring in the brain, which play the part of a material clock, whose indications
the mind can read. The rough measures of duration made by the internal
time-sense are of little use for scientific purposes, and physics is accustomed
to base time-reckoning on more precise external mechanisms. It is, however,
desirable to examine the relation of this more primitive notion of time to the
scheme developed in physics.
Much confusion has arisen from a failure to realise that time as currently
used in physics and astronomy deviates widely from the time recognised by
the primitive time-sense. In fact the time of which we are immediately conscious
is not in general physical time, but the more fundamental quantity
which we have called interval (confined, however, to timelike intervals).
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Our time-sense is not concerned with events outside our brains; it relates
only to the linear chain of events along our own track through the world. We
may learn from another observer similar information as to the time-succession
of events along his track. Further we have inanimate observers---clocks---from
which we may obtain similar information as to their local time-successions.
The combination of these linear successions along different tracks into a complete
ordering of the events in relation to one another is a problem that
requires careful analysis, and is not correctly solved by the haphazard intuitions
of pre-relativity physics. Recognising that both clocks and time-sense measure~$ds$
between pairs of events along their respective tracks, we see that the
problem reduces to that which we have already been studying, viz.\ to pass
from a description in terms of intervals between pairs of events to a description
in terms of coordinates.
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