Henri Bergson: Half-relativity – Lorentz Equations (10)

by Nicolae Sfetcu | posted in: Relativity | 0

Now I must add that I consider these changes beneficial. Let us indeed leave ponderable matter behind. What would my situation be with regard to light, and more generally electromagnetic facts, if my dimensions of space and time had remained what they were! These events are not involved in the movement of my system.

Light waves and electromagnetic disturbances may well originate in a mobile system: experience proves that they do not adopt the movement. My mobile system deposits them in passing, so to speak, into the immobile ether, which then takes care of them. Even, if ether did not exist, it would be invented to symbolize this experimentally observed fact, the independence of the speed of light in relation to the movement of the source which emitted it.

Now, in this ether, in front of these optical facts, in the middle of these electromagnetic events, you sit motionless. But I cross them, and what you see from your fixed observatory in the ether risks appearing to me, quite differently. The science of electromagnetism, which you have so laboriously constructed, would have been for me to redo; I would have had to modify my equations, once established, for each new speed of my system.

What would I have done in a universe thus constructed? At what price would the liquefaction of all science have been purchased the solidity of temporal and spatial relations!

But thanks to the contraction of my lengths, to the dilation of my Time, to the dislocation of my simultaneities, my system becomes, with respect to electromagnetic phenomena, the exact counterfeit of a fixed system. He may run as fast as he pleases alongside a light wave: it will always maintain the same speed for him, he will be as if immobile in relation to it. Everything is for the best, and it is a good genius who has arranged things this way.