It must, in fine, be clearly understood that the Einsteinian Interval tells us nothing about the absolute, about things in themselves. It, like all others, shows us only relations between things. But the relations which it discloses seem to be real and unvarying. They share the degree of objective truth which classic science attributed, with, perhaps, unfounded assurance, to the chronological and spatial relations of phenomena. In the view of the new physics these were but false scales. The Einsteinian Interval alone shows us what can be known of reality.
Einstein’s system, therefore, takes pride in having lifted for all future time a corner of the veil which conceals from us the sacred nudity of nature.
CHAPTER IV
EINSTEIN’S MECHANICS
The mechanical foundation of all the sciences—Ascending the stream of time—The speed of light an impassable limit—The addition of speeds and Fizeau’s experiment—Variability of mass—The ballistics of electrons—Gravitation and light as atomic microcosms—Matter and energy—The death of the sun.
When Baudelaire wrote:
I hate the movement that displaces lines,
he thought only, like the physicists of his time, of the static deformations which have been known as long as there have been men to observe them. What we have seen about Einsteinian time and space has taught us that there must be, in addition to these, kinematic deformations, to which every material object, however rigid it seems, is liable.
Movement, therefore, displaces lines much more than Baudelaire supposed, even the lines of the hardest of marble statues. This kind of deformation, which is pleasant rather than hateful, since it brings us nearer to the heart of things, has upset the whole of mechanics.
Mechanics is at the foundation of all the experimental sciences, because it is the simplest, and because the phenomena it studies are always present—if not exclusively present—amongst the phenomenal objects of the other sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology.