Page:Russell - An outline of philosophy.pdf/128

116 photographic plate. The peculiarities of the "observer" in this region belong to physics, not to psychology.

So long as we continue to think in terms of bodies moving, and try to adjust this way of thinking to the new ideas by successive corrections, we shall only get more and more confused. The only way to get clear is to make a fresh start, with events instead of bodies. In physics, an "event" is anything which, according to the old notions, would be said to have both a date and a place. An explosion, a flash of lightning, the starting of a light-wave from an atom, the arrival of the light-wave at some other body, any of these would be an "event". Some strings of events make up what we regard as the history of one body; some make up the course of one light- wave; and so on. The unity of a body is a unity of history—it is like the unity of a tune, which takes time to play, and does not exist whole in any one moment. What exists at any one moment is only what we call an "event". It may be that the word "event", as used in physics, cannot be quite identified with the same word as used in psychology; for the present we are concerned with "events" as the constituents of physical processes, and need not trouble ourselves about "events" in psychology.

The events in the physical world have relations to each other which are of the sort that have led to the notions of space and time. They have relations of order, so that we can say that one event is nearer to a second than to a third. In this way we can arrive at the notion of the "neighbourhood" of an event: it will consist roughly speaking of all the events that are very near the given event. When we say that neighbouring events have a certain relation, we shall mean that the nearer two events are to each other, the more nearly they have this relation, and that they approximate to having it without limit as they are taken nearer and nearer together.

Two neighbouring events have a measurable quantitative relation called "interval", which is sometimes analogous to distance in space, sometimes to lapse of time. In the former case it is called space-like, in the latter time-like. The interval