Questions of Common Sense

Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation by Albert Einstein, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Questions of Common Sense

Questions of Common Sense

[But it is obvious from what has just been said that if we are to adopt Einstein’s theory, we must make very radical changes in some of our fundamental notions, changes that seem in violent conflict with common sense. It is unfortunate that many popularizers of relativity have been more concerned to astonish their readers with incredible paradoxes than to give an account such as would appeal to sound judgment. Many of these paradoxes do not belong essentially to the theory at all. There is nothing in the latter that an enlarged and enlightened common sense would not readily endorse. But common sense must be educated up to the necessary level.]141

[There was a time when it was believed, as a result of centuries of experience, that the world was flat. This belief checked up with the known facts, and it could be used as the basis for a system of science which would account for things that had happened and that were to happen. It was entirely sufficient for the time in which it prevailed.

Then one day a man arose to point out that all the known facts were equally accounted for on the theory that the earth was a sphere. It was in order for his contemporaries to admit this, to say that so far as the facts in hand were concerned they could not tell whether the earth was flat or round—that new facts would have to be sought that would contradict one or the other hypothesis. Instead of this the world laughed and insisted that the earth could not be round because it was flat; that it could [72]not be round because then the people would fall off the other side.

But the field of experimentation widened, and men were able to observe facts that had been hidden from them. Presently a man sailed west and arrived east; and it became clear that in spite of previously accepted “facts” to the contrary, the earth was really round. The previously accepted “facts” were then revised to fit the newly discovered truth; and finally a new system of science came into being, which accounted for all the old facts and all the new ones.

At intervals this sort of thing has been repeated. A Galileo shows that preconceived ideas with regard to the heavens are wrong, and must be revised to accord with his newly promulgated principles. A Newton does the same for physics—and people unlearn the “fact” that motion has to be supported by continued application of force, substituting the new idea that it actually requires force to stop a moving body. A Harvey shows that the things which have been “known” for generations about the human body are not so. A Lyell and a Darwin force men to throw overboard the things they have always believed about the way in which the earth and its creatures came into being. Every science we possess has passed through one or more of these periods of readjustment to new facts.

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This book is part of the public domain. Albert Einstein (2020). Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022.

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