Page:The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought.djvu/24

20 Einstein takes us straight to the root of the mystery, and he clears up one point which was misleading, if not actually wrong, in the older explanation. The change of mass does not in any way depend on whether the mass is of electrical origin or not; it arises simply from the fact that mass is a relative quantity, depending by its definition on the relative quantities length and time. Let us look at the β particle from its own point of view; it is just an ordinary electron in no way different from any other. 'But it is travelling unusually rapidly?' 'That', says the electron, 'is a matter of opinion. So far as I am aware I am at rest, if the word "rest" has any meaning. In fact I was just contemplating with amazement your extraordinary speed of 100,000 miles a second with which you are shooting past me.' Of course our motion is of no particular concern to the electron, and it will not modify its constitution on our account; so it keeps its mass, radius, electric field, &c., equal to the standard constants applying to electrons in general. These terms are relative, and refer therefore to some particular frame of space and time—clearly the frame appropriate to an electron in self-contemplation, viz. the one with respect to which it is at rest. But this frame is not the usual geocentric frame to which we refer quantities such as length, time, and mass; there is a difference of 100,000 miles a second between our station of observation and that of the β particle in self-contemplation. It is a mere matter of geometry to discover what the β particle's lengths and times become when referred to the partitions which we have drawn across the world. But when we calculate the consequential change of mass resulting from the changes of length and time, we find that it should be increased in precisely the proportion indicated by the most refined experiments.