Abstract
IN a paper read at a meeting of the Victoria Institute, London, on April 4, entitled “ Fallacies underlying the Einstein-Eddington Conception of Curved Space”, Mr. Albert Eagle declared that “the whole conception does such violence to the nature of our minds that we can only call it a lie....” He admitted that a disk might change its dimensions in a gravitational field, and so be distorted, but this should be regarded as a distortion of matter, not of space. The relativity formula for the distance between two points in a gravitational field might be correct if applied to the measurements taken with a material measuring rod, but such measurements should not be taken as the space of external reality. Mr. Eagle regarded the idea of curved space as self-contradictory, chiefly on psychological grounds. Moreover, he deprecated the attempt to abstract from reality everything that is tangible, and the attempt to reduce the physical universe to a purely geometrical universe. He complained that “practically no editor will publish an article making an attack on the theory”. Quite apart from the difficulty under which most editors labour of finding space for the many contributions submitted, it may be suggested that a partial explanation may be, in Mr. Eagle's own words, that “Some people may think that I have more moral indignation, perhaps amounting evento animosity, against the theory of curved space than can be justified against any mere theory, no matter how erroneous or misleading it is.”
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
The Conception of Curved Space. Nature 141, 679 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141679a0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141679a0