Page:The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought.djvu/19

Rh which we now ask the brain to make is a novel one. That explains why the result seems to transcend our ordinary mode of thought.

The discovery, or one should rather say the rediscovery, of the world of four dimensions is due to Minkowski. Einstein had worked out fully the relations between the frames of space and time for observers with different motions. To the genius of Minkowski we owe the realization that these frames are merely systems of partitions arbitrarily drawn across a four-dimensional world which is common to all observers.

There is a strange delusion that the fourth dimension must be something wholly beyond the conception of the ordinary man, and that only the mathematician can be initiated into its mysteries. It is true that the mathematician has the advantage of understanding the technical machinery for solving the problems which may arise in studying the world of four dimensions; but as regards the conception of the four dimensions of the world his point of view is the same as that of anybody else. Is it supposed that by intense thought he throws himself into some state of trance in which he perceives some hitherto unsuspected direction stretching away at right angles to length, breadth, and thickness? That would not be much use. The world of four dimensions, of which we are now speaking, is perfectly familiar to everybody. It is obvious to every one—even to the mathematician—that the world of solid and permanent objects has three dimensions and no more; that objects are arranged in a threefold order, which for any particular individual may be analysed into right-and-left, backwards-and-forwards, up-and-down. But it is no less obvious to every one that the world of events is of four dimensions; that events are arranged in a fourfold order, which in the experience of any particular