Page:The theory of relativity and its influence on scientific thought.djvu/9

Rh to which we appeal when we state, for example, that one event is 100 miles distant from and 10 hours later than another. The terms space and time have not only a vague descriptive reference to a boundless void and an ever-rolling stream, but denote an exact quantitative system of reckoning distances and time-intervals. Einstein's first great discovery was that there are many such systems of reckoning—many possible frames of space and time—exactly on all fours with one another. No one of these can be distinguished as more fundamental than the rest; no one frame rather than another can be identified as the scaffolding used in the construction of the world. And yet one of them does present itself to us as being the actual space and time of our experience; and we recoil from the other equivalent frames which seem to us artificial systems in which distance and duration are mixed up in an extraordinary way. What is the cause of this invidious selection? It is not determined by anything distinctive in the frame; it is determined by something distinctive in us—by the fact that our existence is bound to a particular planet and our motion is the motion of that planet. Nature offers an infinite choice of frames; we select the one in which we and our petty terrestrial concerns take the most distinguished position. Our mischievous geocentric outlook has cropped out again unsuspected, persuading us to insist on this terrestrial space-time frame which in the general scheme of nature is in no way superior to other frames.

The more closely we examine the processes by which events are assigned to their positions in space and time, the more clearly do we see that our local circumstances play a considerable part in it. We have no more right to expect that the space-time frame on the sun will be identical with our frame on the earth than to expect that