Page:Eddington A. Space Time and Gravitation. 1920.djvu/53

II] The term "real world" is used in the ordinary sense of physics, without any intention of prejudging philosophical questions as to reality. It has the same degree of reality as was formerly attributed to the three-dimensional world of scientific theory or everyday conception, which by the advance of knowledge it replaces. As I have already indicated, it is merely the accident that we are not furnished with a pair of eyes in rapid relative motion, which has allowed our brains to neglect to develop a faculty for visualising this four-dimensional world as directly as we visualise its three-dimensional section.

It is now easy to see that length and duration must be the components of a single entity in the four-dimensional world of space-time. Just as we resolve a structure into plan and elevation, so we resolve extension in the four-dimensional world into length and duration. The structure has a size and shape independent of our choice of vertical. Similarly with things in space-time. Whereas length and duration are relative, the single "extension" of which they are components has an absolute significance in nature, independent of the particular decomposition into space and time separately adopted by the observer.

Consider two events; for example, the stroke of one o'clock and the stroke of two o'clock by Big Ben. These occupy two points in space-time, and there is a definite separation between them. An observer at Westminster considers that they occur at the same place, and that they are separated by an hour in time; thus he resolves their four-dimensional separation into zero distance in space and one hour distance in time. An observer on the sun considers that they do not occur at the same place; they are separated by about 70,000 miles, that being the distance travelled by the earth in its orbital motion with respect to the sun. It is clear that he is not resolving in quite the same directions as the terrestrial observer, since he finds the space-component to be 70,000 miles instead of zero. But if he alters one component he must necessarily alter the other; so he will make the time-component differ slightly from an hour. By analogy with resolution into components in three-dimensions, we should expect him to make it less than an hour—having, as it were, borrowed from time to make space; but as a matter of fact he makes it longer. This is because space-time has a different