Volume 2, Number 3 · March 19, 1964
Relativity Since Einstein
By Stephen Toulmin
Philosophical Problems of Space and Time
by Adolph Grünbaum
Knopf, 448 pp., $10.75
Relativity-theory has always been a peculiarly philosophical branch of science: Einstein recognized a particular debt to Hume and Mach and current debates about the Rip-van-Winkle paradox are evidence that it is so still. The reasons are easily seen. Other scientists frame novel concepts to match newly-discovered facts, but the relativity-physicist has a more Socratic task—that of uncovering the presuppositions of our inherited ideas of space and time, and drawing fresh distinctions to cover situations in which those presuppositions fail us. So in thinking about relativity we are plunged into a world, not so much of costly apparatus and painstaking observations, as of suppressed premises and distinguos—into a conceptual, rather than an experimental argument. Nor is there anything unscientific about this fact: it is just in the nature of the case.
Review, 1413 words
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