Within its own limits of accuracy the scheme of location of objects that I am instinctively “aware” of is the same as my scientific scheme of location, or frame of space. When we use a carefully made telescope lens and a sensitised plate instead of the crystalline lens and retina of the eye we increase the accuracy but do not alter the character of our survey of space. It is by this increase of refinement that we have become “aware” of certain characteristics of space which were not known to our ape-like ancestor when he instituted the common ideas that have come down to us. His scheme of location works consistently so long as there is no important change in his motion (a few miles a second makes no appreciable difference); but a large change involves a transition to a different system of location which is likewise self-consistent, although it is [Pg 18] inconsistent with the original one. Having any number of these systems of location, or frames of space, we can no longer pretend that each of them indicates “just where things are”. Location is not something supernaturally revealed to the mind; it is a kind of conventional summary of those properties or relations of objects which condition certain visual and tactual sensations. Does not this show that “right” location in space cannot be nearly so important and fundamental as it is made out to be in the Newtonian scheme of things? The different observers are able to play fast and loose with it without ill effects. Suppose that location is, I will not say entirely a myth, but not quite the definite thing it is made out to be in classical physics; that the Newtonian idea of location contains some truth and some padding, and it is not the truth but the padding that our observers are quarrelling over. That would explain a great deal. It would explain, for instance, why all the forces of Nature seem to have entered into a conspiracy to prevent our discovering the definite location of any object (its position in the “right” frame of space); naturally they cannot reveal it, if it does not exist.