Abstract
General Relativity describes the universe as a four-dimensional spacetime manifold which is somehow ‘curved’. Accounts of curved spacetime often claim that most of us find it impossible to imagine four-dimensional spacetime, and so should not even try to do so. This paper examines the claim that the best description of the universe is counter-intuitive and suggests ways to re-educate our intuitions to make them compatible with what seems to be the best science around. The paper examines two world views, or pictures of the universe — the Aristotelian and the Newtonian — and argues that we have forgotten (or perhaps never realized) how much of an idealization the Newtonian world view actually is. For this reason we have come to believe that we can only ‘see’ the world in three spatial dimensions. The paper ends by describing an alternative idealization, or set of pictures, that would lead us to find the claim that the universe is a four-dimensional spacetime manifold ‘perfectly natural’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abell, G.O.: 1978, The Drama of the Universe, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.
Cartwright, N.: 1983, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Crease, R.P. and C.C. Mann: 1986, The Second Creation, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York.
Durham, F. and R.D. Purrington: 1983, Frame of the Universe, Columbia University Press, New York.
Einstein, A.: 1963, ‘Principles of Research’, in: Ideas and Opinions, S. Bargmann (Trans.), Publishing, New York. (Original address delivered 1918.)
Kuhn, T.S.: 1957, The Copernican Revolution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kuhn, T.S.: 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Nicolson, I.: 1981, Gravity, Blackholes and the Universe, John Wiley and Sons, New York.
Ohanian, H.C.: 1976, Gravitation and Spacetime, W.W. Norton, New York.
Reichenbach, H.: 1956, The Philosophy of Space and Time, M. Reichenbach and J. Freund (Trans.), Dover Publications, New York. (Original work published 1926.)
Russell, B.: 1925, The ABC's of Relativity, George Allen and Unwin, London.
Schwarz, J.H.: 1987, ‘Superstring Unification’, in: S.W. Hawking and W. Israel (Eds.), Three hundred years of gravitation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 652–675.
Shapere, Dudley: 1967, ‘Isaac Newton’, in: Paul Edward (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., New York, pp. 489–491.
Taylor, E.F. and J.A. Wheeler: 1963, Spacetime Physics, W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco.
Weinberg, S.: 1977, The First Three Minutes, Bantam Books, New York.
Weinberg, S.: 1979, ‘Einstein and Spacetime: Then and Now’, in: The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 33: 35–47.
Wittgenstein, L.: 1953, The Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe (Trans.), The Macmillan Company, New York.
Zukav, G.: 1979, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chandler, M. Philosophy of gravity: Intuitions of four-dimensional curved spacetime. Sci Educ 3, 155–176 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00486389
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00486389