The nature of the physical worldEddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Philosophy
The nature of the physical world
Eddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Physics -- Philosophy; Science -- Philosophy
Location of Events. In Fig. 1 you see a collection of events,
indicated by circles. They are not at present in their right places;
that is the job before me—to put them into proper location in my
frame of space and time. Among them I can immediately recognise and
label the event Here-Now, viz. that which is happening in this room
at this moment. The other events are at varying degrees of remoteness
from Here-Now, and it is obvious to me that the remoteness is not
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only of different degrees but of different kinds. Some events spread
away towards what in a general way I call the Past; I can contemplate
others which are distant in the Future; others are remote in another
kind of way towards China or Peru, or in general terms Elsewhere. In
this picture I have only room for one dimension of Elsewhere; another
dimension sticks out at right angles to the paper; and you must imagine
the third dimension as best you can.
Now we must pass from this vague scheme of location to a precise
scheme. The first and most important thing is to put Myself into the
picture. It sounds egotistical; but, you see, it is my frame of
space that will be used, so it all hangs round me. Here I am—a
kind of four-dimensional worm (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2
It is a correct portrait; I have considerable extension towards the
Past and presumably towards the Future, and only a moderate extension
towards Elsewhere. The “instantaneous me”, i.e. myself at this instant,
coincides with the event Here-Now. Surveying the world from Here-Now,
I can see many other events happening now. That puts it into my head
that the instant of which I am conscious here must be extended to
include them; and I jump to the conclusion that Now is not confined
to Here-Now. I therefore draw the instant Now, running as a clean
section across the world of events, in order to accommodate all the
distant events which are happening now. I select the events which I see
happening now and place them on this section, which I call a moment of
time or an “instantaneous state of the world”. I locate them on Now
because they seem to be Now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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