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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    is obvious to me that the remoteness is not only of different degrees but of different kinds. Some events spread away towards what in a general way I call the Past; I can contemplate others which are distant in the Future; others are remote in another kind of way towards China or Peru, or in general terms Elsewhere. In this picture I have only room for one dimension of Elsewhere; another dimension sticks out at right angles to the paper; and you must imagine the third dimension as best you can. Now we must pass from this vague scheme of location to a precise scheme. The first and most important thing is to put Myself into the picture. It sounds egotistical; but, you see, it is my frame of space that will be used, so it all hangs round me. Here I am—a kind of four¬ dimensional worm (Fig. 2). It is a correct portrait; I have considerable extension towards the Past and presumably towards the Future, and only a moderate extension towards Elsewhere. The “instantaneous me”, i.e. myself at this instant, coincides with the event Here- Now. Surveying the world from Here-Now, I can see many other events happening now. That puts it into my head that the instant of which I am conscious here must be extended to include them; and I jump to the con¬ clusion that Now is not confined to Here-Now. I there¬ fore draw the instant Now, running as a clean section across the world of events, in order to accommodate all the distant events which are happening now. I select the events which I see happening now and place them on this section, which I call a moment of time or an “instantaneous state of the world”. I locate them on Now because they seem to be Now. This method of location lasted until the year 1667, when it was found impossible to make it work consist-
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