As Bertrand Russell pointed out, if everything were relative there would be nothing for it to be relative to. “The statement that everything is relative is as meaningful as the statement that everything is bigger. Newman wrote an extensive article on Einstein’s theories for The Saturday Evening Post in 1959. An act was only ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to something else. It does not mean that we have the right to turn the world mischievously topsy-turvy.” (Read the entire the interview here “What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck” October 26, 1929.)Īnd still Americans used the word for what they thought it should mean: Everything is relative. Relativity, as I see it, merely denotes that certain physical and mechanical facts, which have been regarded as positive and permanent, are relative with regard to certain other facts in the sphere of physics and mechanics. Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. “The meaning of relativity,” Einstein said in a 1929 interview with The Saturday Evening Post, “has been widely misunderstood.
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