Page:Eddington A. Space Time and Gravitation. 1920.djvu/49

II] made Gulliver attribute his own changes to the things around him; it never occurred to Gulliver that his own size had altered; and, if he had thought of the explanation, he could scarcely have accustomed himself to that way of thinking. But both points of view are legitimate. The size of a thing can only be imagined as relative to something else; and there is no means of assigning the change to one end of the relation rather than the other.

We have seen in the theory of the Michelson-Morley experiment that, according to current physical views, our standard of size—the rigid measuring-rod—must change according to the circumstances of its motion; and the aviator's adventures illustrated a similar change in the standard of duration of time. Certain rather puzzling irregularities have been discovered in the apparent motions of the Sun, Mercury, Venus and the Moon; but there is a strong family resemblance between these, which leads us to believe that the real phenomenon is a failure of the time-keeping of our standard clock, the Earth. Instances could be multiplied where a change of the observer or his standards produces or conceals changes in the world around him.

The object of the relativity theory, however, is not to attempt the hopeless task of apportioning responsibility between the observer and the external world, but to emphasise that in our ordinary description and in our scientific description of natural phenomena the two factors are indissolubly united. All the familiar terms of physics—length, duration of time, motion, force, mass, energy, and so on—refer primarily to this relative knowledge of the world; and it remains to be seen whether any of them can be retained in a description of the world which is not relative to a particular observer.

Our first task is a description of the world independent of the motion of the observer. The question of the elimination of his gauge of magnitude belongs to a later development of the theory discussed in Chapter. Let us draw a square $$ABCD$$ on a sheet of paper, making the sides equal, to the best of our knowledge. We have seen that an aviator flying at 161,000 miles a second in the direction $$AB$$, would judge that the sides $$AB$$, $$DC$$ had contracted to half their length, so that for him the figure would be an oblong. If it were turned through a right E.S.