11: Spacetime and The Ethereal Road to Relativity

Nowadays a lot of people are giving a lot of thought to the nature of space and time. It’s really nothing new; so did the philosophers of the classical ancient world and in fact, in the 18th and 19th centuries that saw an explosion of both theoretical and experimental activity. Most influential in that regard was Isaac Newton who regarded “absolute” space as remaining “immutable” without “reference to any external object” and “absolute time” as flowing uniformly and similarly constrained (Newton 1729)…