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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE RELATIVITY OF UNIFORM MOTION Classical Ideas On The Subject; The Ether And The Apparent Possibility Of Absolute Motion; The Mlchelson-morley Ex- PERIMENT And The Final Nega- Tion Of This Possibility By Various Contributors And The Editor TT7HEN we speak of a body as being "in motion, " we mean that this body is changing its position "in space." Now it is clear that the position of an object can only be determined with reference to other objects: in order to describe the place of a material thing we must, for example state its distances from other things. If there were no such bodies of reference, the words "position in space" would have no definite meaning for us.]2 [The number of such external bodies of reference which it is necessary to cite in order to define completely the position of a given body in space depends upon the character of the space dealt with. We have seen that when we visualize the space of our experience as a surface of any character, two citations are sufficient; and that when we conceive of it as surrounding us in three dimensions we require three. It will be realized that the mathematicianis merely meeting this requirement when he sets up his system of coordinate axes to serve as a reference frame.] [What is true of "place" must be true also of "motion, " since the latter is nothing but change of place. In fact, it would be impossible to ascribe a state of motion or of rest to a body poised all alone in empty space. Whether a body is to be regarded as resting or as moving, and if the latter at what speed, depends entirely upon the objects to which we refer its positions in space.]24 [As Einstein sits at his desk he appears to us to be at rest; but we know that he is moving with the rotation of the earth on its axis, with the earth in
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Einstein's theories of relativity and gravitation
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