Page:The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought.djvu/34

30 idea of why Einstein found it necessary to amend Newton's law of gravitation. Let us return to the illustration of the pig, and imagine that we wish to discover the law governing the distribution of fat and lean in the animal. From the breakfast-table standpoint a plausible type of law would be that half of each rasher is fat and the other half lean; and if this turned out to be confirmed very approximately by observation we might well imagine that we had discovered the exact law of porcine structure. But the case is altered if we give up the breakfast-table standpoint and contemplate the animal in a more general way, remembering that he has not been designed with any particular reference to the series of rashers into which our grocer has chosen to slice him. We must now look for a different type of law altogether. Two possibilities may arise. We may find that our proposed law, although expressed in breakfast-table parlance, is nevertheless equivalent to a possible biological law; it may be immediately capable of translation into a more general statement which makes no reference to a particular stratification. But on the other hand, it may happen that the suggested law cannot be freed from this reference to a particular system of slicing. In that case we can only regard it as approximate, perhaps holding fairly well for the slices of which we have most experience but becoming less and less accurate in the more tortuous parts of the animal. Both these cases are illustrated in Einstein's modifications of classical theory. Newton's law of gravitation explicitly refers to a space-time frame and therefore to a world stratified into instantaneous states. It proves to be impossible to free it from this reference to a particular stratification without modifying it. In fact if the crucial astronomical observations had shown that Newton's law and not Einstein's was the