The Rudiments of Relativity Lectures Delivered Under the Auspices of the University College, Johannesburg, Scientific Society (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Rudiments of Relativity: Lectures Delivered Under the Auspices of the University College, Johannesburg, Scientific Society The object of the investigation of natural phenomena, which is the purpose of Natural Philosophy, is the introduction of order into the apparently chaotic appear ances of Nature. In accomplishing this, reliance is placed upon two fundamental a priort' relations of order. The first of these relational processes is an immediate application of the serial order involvedin the idea expressed by the words before and after. Of two events, A and B, which present themselves to my con sciousness, I can generally state that A either precedes or succeeds B. To avoid complications, I consider only events of sufficiently short duration; otherwise there might be overlapping, and it would then be possible for event A to both precede and succeed event B. If, for example, event A were my addressing you to-night, and event B were the passage of the hands of the clock across the position usually read as 9 o'clock, then A would both precede and succeed B. We shall exclude such over lapping, and imagine that we are dealing with events of such short duration that we can relate them in definite serial order. This intuitive seriation yields us a time order in which the conscious mind can arrange its experiences. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.