Abstract
If we now turn back to an aspect of the new theory we had temporarily set aside, namely, the manner in which it tends to modify the ordinary concept of time, we shall readily recognize that here again it is properly a question of spatialization. “Henceforth,” Minkowski says, in setting forth the fundamentals of his conception, “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” A little later in the same fundamental exposition of his theory he repeats that “space and time are to fade away into shadows, and only a world in itself will subsist.”1
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Notes
H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein and H. Minkowski, Das Relativitätsprinzip (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 56, 59 [Hermann Minkowski, ’Space and Time,’ The Principle of Relativity, trans. W. Perrett and G. B. Jeffery (London: Methuen, 1923; reprint New York: Dover, n.d.), pp. 75,80].
Max Born, La théorie de la relativité d’Einstein, trans. Finkelstein and Verdier (Paris, 1923), p. 283. For the importance of Minknowski’s works, cf. also Max von Laue, Die Relativitätstheorie, 3rd ed. (Brunswick, 1919), 1:118, 169, 196; and Ebenezer Cunningham, The Principle of Relativity (Cambridge, 1914), p. 86.
Lorentz et al., p. 69 [Arnold Sommerfeld, Notes to Minkowski’s ’Space and Time,’ The Principle of Relativity, p. 92]. Cf. also what we have said on this subject in ES 2:377, n. 3.
Cf. ER 119 (Eng. 449): “All spatial and temporal values [are] exchangeable with each other. … The direction into the past and that into the future are distinguished from each other … by nothing more than the + and - directions in space”.
STM 283, 217 (a part of the first quoted passage is cited in §47 above). It can be seen (STM 274, 283) that the author does not shrink from the very strange consequences of these conceptions.
Lorentz et al., p. 56 [Eng., ’Space and Time,’ p. 75].
Cf. Roberto Marcolongo, Relatività (Messina, 1921), p. 98 [RSG, 122]. In a more recent work Einstein declares that “it is neither the point in space, nor the instant in time, at which something happens that has physical reality, but only the event itself”, so that “there is no absolute ... relation in space, and no absolute relation in time between two events, but there is an absolute ... relation in space and time”. He adds that “the circumstance that there is no objective rational division of the four-dimensional continuum into a three-dimensional space and a one-dimensional time continuum indicates that the laws of nature will assume a form which is logically most satisfactory when expressed as laws in the four-dimensional space-time continuum”. At the same time he does recognize, however, that we “must remember that the time coordinate is defined physically wholly differently from the space coordinates” (WR 20–21; Eng. 30–31).
[The bracketed phrase occurs at this point in the translation used by Meyerson (Espace, temps, gravitation, trans. J. Rossignol, Paris, 1921, pp. 59, 63), but not in Eddington’s original. Although it is certainly true that many interpreters of relativity did - and many still do - interpret the theory as these quotations from Eddington suggest, Eddington himself did not. If one reads STG carefully, the context makes it clear that the position Eddington is describing here is one he himself rejects. Cf. Eddington, The Nature of The Physical World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), pp. 50–52, 55–58; Milič Čapek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York: van Nostrand, 1969), p. 186, n. 9.]
Henri Marais, Introduction géométrique à l’étude de la relativité (Paris, 1923), p. 96. This statement, significantly enough, follows those cited above §§20 and 47, where he affirms the reality of the entities defined by physical theory in general and relativity theory in particular.
Ebenezer Cunningham, The Principle of Relativity, pp. 191, 213–214 [the first bracketed insertion is Meyerson’s].
Bertrand Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (Cambridge, 1897), p. 150, § 144 [Meyerson quotes Essai sur les fondements de la géométrie, trans. Cadenat (Paris, 1901)].
Here, and in the following paragraphs, we are only summarizing our arguments in IR 29 ff. (Eng. 37 ff.), ES 1:150 ff., and at the 6 April 1922 meeting of the Société Frangaise de Philosophie (Bulletin 22 [1922] 107 ff.) [See Appendix 2].
Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Understanding, rule 14 [The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge, 1931; reprint New York: Dover, 1955), 1:61].
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Traité de dynamique (Paris, 1758), pp. vii–viii, and Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751), under the word ’Dimension’, 4:1010. The following is a more complete text of the second of these passages, which I find particularly interesting: “I have said above that it was not possible to imagine more than three dimensions. A clever acquaintance of mine believes, however, that duration could be regarded as a fourth dimension and that the product of time and solidity would be in some way a product of four dimensions; that idea can be contested, but it seems to me that it has some merit, if only that of novelty”.
Joseph Louis de Lagrange, Théorie des fonctions analytiques, OEuvres (Paris, 1867–1892), 9:337.
Henri Bergson, Durée et simultanéité (Paris, 1922), p. 82 [Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 61].
Jean Becquerel, Le principe de la relativité et la Théorie de la gravitation (Paris, 1922), pp. 8–9; cf. p. 36. Edmond Bauer likewise insists on the fact that “in classical theory” there remains “a complete dissymmetry” between time and space, which “somewhat compromises the rigor and elegance of classical kinematics” (La theorie de la relativite, Paris, 1922, pp. 23–24).
Antoine Cournot, Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme (Paris, 1975), p. 93.
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Meyerson, É. (1985). Time. In: The Relativistic Deduction. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 83. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5211-9_8
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