The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thoughtEddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Philosophy
The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought
Eddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir
Relativity (Physics); Science -- Philosophy
I think that we can without mathematics form a general idea of why
Einstein found it necessary to amend Newton's law of gravitation. Let us
return to the illustration of the pig, and imagine that we wish to
discover the law governing the distribution of fat and lean in the
animal. From the breakfast-table standpoint a plausible type of law
would be that half of each rasher is fat and the other half lean; and if
this turned out to be confirmed very approximately by observation we
might well imagine that we had discovered the exact law of porcine
structure. But the case is altered if we give up the breakfast-table
standpoint and contemplate the animal in a more general way, remembering
that he has not been designed with any particular reference to the
series of rashers into which our grocer has chosen to slice him. We must
now look for a different type of law altogether. Two possibilities may
arise. We may find that our proposed law, although expressed in
breakfast-table parlance, is nevertheless equivalent to a possible
biological law; it may be immediately capable of translation into a more
general statement which makes no reference to a particular
stratification. But on the other hand, it may happen that the suggested
law cannot be freed from this reference to a particular system of
slicing. In that case we can only regard it as approximate, perhaps
holding fairly well for the slices of which we have most experience but
becoming less and less accurate in the more tortuous parts of the
animal. Both these cases are illustrated in Einstein's modifications of
classical theory. Newton's law of gravitation explicitly refers to a
space-time frame and therefore to a world stratified into instantaneous
states. It proves to be impossible to free it from this reference to a
particular stratification without modifying it. In fact if the crucial
astronomical observations had shown that Newton's law and not Einstein's
was the exact law of gravitation, this would have been evidence of a
real stratification of the structure of the world--a stratification
revealed by no other phenomena. Einstein's law is the simpler law
because it is consistent with what we now know of the general plan of
world-structure; Newton's law could only be made possible by introducing
a novel and specialized feature--a stratified arrangement of
structure--which is not revealed in any other phenomena.
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