Page:The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought.djvu/20

16 will be analysed into right-and-left, backwards-and-forwards, up-and-down, sooner-and-later. The subject of our study is external nature, which is a world of events, common to all observers but represented by them differently in their parochial frames of space and time; it is obvious to the most commonplace experience that this absolute world contains a fourfold order.

The news that the events around us form a world of four dimensions is as stale as the news that Queen Anne is dead. The reason why the relativist resurrects this ancient truism is because it is only in this undissected combination of four dimensions that the experiences of all observers meet. In our own experience one dimension is sharply separated from the other three and is distinguished as time; but our experience is solely terrestrial, and if we insist on building the scheme of nature on purely terrestrial experience we are limiting ourselves to the mediaeval geocentric system of the world.

We have been accustomed to regard the enduring world as composed of a continuous succession of instantaneous states, as though the world of events were stratified. Each event is supposed to lie in a definite instant or stratum, and the orderly succession of these strata makes up the whole of reality. The instant 'NOW' represents one such stratum running throughout the universe. Indeed we are accustomed to extend it beyond the universe, and we even use the word 'now' with reference to the existence of those who have passed away from the material world. The investigations of the relativity theory show incontrovertibly that this supposed stratification is an illusion; there is not the