The Principle of Relativity, With Applications to Physical Science (Classic Reprint)

It takes its rise from that awakening from dogmatic slumber to use Kant sphrase which we owe toE instein and Minkowski. But it is not an attempt to expound either Einstein searlier or his later theory. The metrical formulae finally arrived at are those of the earlier theory, but the meanings ascribed to the algebraic symbols are entirely different. As the result of a consideration of the character of our knowledge in general, and of our knowledge of nature in particular, undertaken in Part I of this book and in my two previous works on this subject, I deduce that our experience requires and exhibits a basis of uniformity, and that in the case of nature this basis exhibits itself as the uniformity of spatio-temporal relations. This conclusion entirely cuts away the casual heterogeneity of these relations which is the essential of Einstein slater theory. It is this uniformity which is essential to my outlook, and not theE uclidean geometry which I adopt as lending itself to the simplest exposition of the facts of nature. I should be very willing to believe that each permanent space is either uniformly elliptic or uniformly hyperbolic, if any observations are more simply explained by such a hypothesis. It is inherent in my theory to maintain the old division between physics and geometry. Physics is the The Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature, both Cambridge Univ. Press.
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