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Einstein's Second Treatment of Simultaneity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Peter A. Bowman
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Extract

Much has been written on the 1905 paper in which Einstein founded the special theory of relativity, his justly famous “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” [4]. In it he innovatively defined the simultaneity of events at two distant points by imagining a light signal to be sent from one point to the other and back. In effect he defined the midpoint of the time interval between the signal's emission and return at one point to be simultaneous with its reflection at the other. And a large fraction of the writing about this paper (e.g., [19], [20], [3], [12]) has been concerned to show that, without denying any physical fact, he could have chosen any other point in the interval and thereby given an equally satisfactory alternative definition.

Type
Part III. Philosophy of Physics
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 70 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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