The nature of the physical world / by A.S. Eddington.

  • Arthur Eddington
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The nature of the physical world / by A.S. Eddington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    travelling at high speed—whether instruments of a technical kind or, for example, a human retina. In only one respect do I treat my nebular observer as more than a piece of registering apparatus; I assume that he is subject to a common failing of human nature, viz. he takes it for granted that it was his planet that God chiefly had in mind when the universe was created. Hence he is (like my reader perhaps?) disinclined to take seriously the views of location of those people who are so misguided as to move at 1000 miles a second relatively to his parish pump. An exceptionally modest observer might take some other planet than his own as the standard of rest. Then he would have to correct all his measurements for the FitzGerald contraction due to his own motion with respect to the standard, and the corrected measures would give the space-frame belonging to the standard planet as the original measures gave the space-frame of his own planet. For him the dilemma is even more pressing, for there is nothing to guide him as to the planet to be selected for the standard of rest. Once he gives up the naive assumption that his own frame is the one and only right frame the question arises, Which then of the innumerable other frames is right? There is no answer, and so far as we can see no possibility of an answer. Meanwhile all his experimental measure¬ ments are waiting unreduced, because the corrections to be applied to them depend on the answer. I am afraid our modest observer will get rather left behind by his less humble colleagues. The trouble that arises is not that we have found anything necessarily wrong with the frame of location that has been employed in our system of physics; it has not led to experimental contradictions. The only thing
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