Page:The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought.djvu/22

18 happening 'now', so that I jump to the conclusion that this instant of which I am conscious has to be extended to include them. But that idea is another inheritance from the dark ages, overthrown by Römer in 1675. It is not the events themselves but the sense-impressions to which they give rise which are happening in the instant NOW. So my justification for placing the events outside me in the instants of which I am conscious has entirely disappeared. Unfortunately, however, the crude outlook was not abolished, but patched up; it was found that the immediate difficulties could be met by locating the external events not in the instant of our visual perception of them but in an instant which we had experienced a little time back—allowing, as we say, for the time of propagation of light. Thus our instants were still made to extend through space; but they were carried like partitions among the events by an artificial process of computation, and no longer by immediate intuition. The relativity theory recognizes these world-wide instants for what they are—artificial partitions constructed for purposes of calculation. I may add that it in no way tampers with the local instants which form the stream of our consciousness; it fully recognizes that the chain of events in such a time-succession is a series of an entirely distinctive character from the succession of points along a line in space. Those who suspect that Einstein's theory is playing unjustifiable tricks with time should realize that it leaves entirely untouched that time-succession of which we have intuitive knowledge, and confines itself to overhauling the artificial scheme of time which Römer first introduced into physics.

The study of the four-dimensional world of events gives us a new insight into the processes of nature because it removes the irrelevant stratification in a