Page:Eddington A. Space Time and Gravitation. 1920.djvu/59

II] formerly supposed to be intrinsic in the frames themselves—rest, rectangularity, acceleration—independent of the absolute structure of the world that is referred to them. Accordingly the objection to attributing absolute properties to Newton's frame of reference is not that it is impossible for a frame of reference to acquire absolute properties, but that the Newtonian frame has been laid down on the basis of relative knowledge without any attempt to follow the lines of absolute structure.

Force, as known to us observationally, is like the other quantities of physics, a relation. The force, measured with a spring-balance, for example, depends on the acceleration of the observer holding the balance; and the term may, like length and duration, have no exact counterpart in a description of nature independent of the observer. Newton's view assumes that there is such a counterpart, an active cause in nature which is identical with the force perceived by his standard unaccelerated observer. Although any other observer perceives this force with additions of his own, it is implied that the original force in nature and the observer's additions can in some way be separated without ambiguity. There is no experimental foundation for this separation, and the relativity view is that a field of force can, like length and duration, be nothing but a link between nature and the observer. There is, of course, something at the far end of the link, just as we found an extension in four dimensions at the far end of the relations denoted by length and duration. We shall have to study the nature of this unknown whose relation to us appears as force. Meanwhile we shall realise that the alteration of perception of force by non-uniform motion of the observer, as well as the alteration of the perception of length by his uniform motion, is what might be expected from the nature of these quantities as relations solely.

We proceed now to a more detailed study of the four-dimensional world, of the things which occur in it, and of the laws by which they are regulated. It is necessary to dive into this absolute world to seek the truth about nature; but the physicist's object is always to obtain knowledge which can be applied to the relative and familiar aspect of the world. The absolute world is of so different a nature, that the relative world, with