124 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
The resistance to the adoption of Einstein’s ideas was due to the
radical change required in the way one regarded space. This, plus the
non-addition of the velocity of light, made his theory very unappealing to
his contemporaries. The Einsteinian worldview was also unpopular
because of the way in which time was regarded. In the Newtonian
worldview, time had an absolute status, like space. In the minds of
scientists and philosophers, there was a clock somewhere in the universe,
which went on ticking through eternity in terms of which all events took
place. In fact, one of the popular images of the universe was that it
was a giant clock, which kept an eternal time. The absolute nature of
time, like space, was also given the status of an a priori truth in Kant’s
philosophical system.
In the Einsteinian worldview, on the other hand, time is merely
the relationship between events. It does not exist per se. If there were
no events in the universe, then there would be no time. We have all,
no doubt, experienced this concept psychologically. When nothing is
happening to us, we lose our sense of time. Those who have spent long
periods of time underground with nothing to do lose their sense of time
altogether. We are most aware of time when we have a great number of
things we must do. Let us consider a universe with a finite lifetime so
that there are two events corresponding to the birth and death of the
universe. Within the framework of Einstein’s worldview, one cannot
conceive of or discuss the time before the creation of the universe or the
time after its destruction. These times simply do not exist as they do in
the Newtonian worldview. As with space, time for Einstein is a
relationship, whereas, for Newton, time is something, which exists and is
real. Time, in the Newtonian sense, is that which a clock tells. Just as a
clock, if properly wound, would continue to run, so time for the
Newtonian continues to pass.
In order to develop a feeling for time in Einstein’s world, we should
examine how the concept of time developed before the existence of the
clock. In essence, our sense of time developed from our ability to order
or sequence events. If I were to whistle, stamp my feet and then clap my
hands before a group of students, there would be a general agreement as
to the order in which I performed each of the events. There might be
disagreements as to the duration between events, but there would be
universal accord concerning the sequencing of the events.
This ability for us to sequence events provides the foundation for our
sense of time. As man began to associate the events in his life with the