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Boring Books for Bedtime Readings to Help You Sleep

The ABC of Relativity, by Bertrand Russell, Part 3

Boring Books for Bedtime Readings to Help You Sleep

Sharon Handy

Sleepless, Rest, Insomnia, Books, Reading, Asmr, Sleep, Health & Fitness, Stress, Meditation, Bedtime, Relaxation, Mental Health, Sleepaid

4.51.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2023

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Let's relax with some sleep-inducing science and learn why space-time is neither space nor time, but so much more. If you’re not entirely sure what the “more” is, never mind. You’ll be asleep anyway.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Good evening, and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

0:09.2

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you

0:17.6

get some sleep. So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume.

0:27.7

Take a nice deep breath in. Let it out slowly. And off we go. Tonight, let's return to the world of modern physics, with more from the ABC of relativity, by Bertrand Russell, author of the Principles of Mathematics,

0:56.5

proposed roads to freedom and why men fight.

1:02.2

First published in 1925 by Harper and Brothers, New York and London.

1:08.8

Let's pick up in our explorations right where we left off at Chapter 5. Let's begin.

1:20.2

Chapter 5, Space Time.

1:24.0

Everybody who has ever heard of relativity knows the phrase,

1:29.0

space time, and knows that the correct thing is to use this phrase, when formerly we should have said,

1:37.0

space and time.

1:39.0

But very few people who are not mathematicians have any clear idea of what is meant by this change of

1:46.7

phraseology. Before dealing further with the special theory of relativity, I want to try to convey to the reader what is

1:56.4

involved in the new phrase space time because that is from a philosophical and imaginative point of view, perhaps the most important

2:07.9

of all the novelties that Einstein has introduced.

2:20.0

Suppose you wish to say where and when some event has occurred, say an explosion on an airship.

2:28.8

You will have to mention four quantities, say the latitude and longitude, the height above the ground and the time. According to the traditional view,

2:35.0

the first three of these give the position in space,

2:39.0

while the fourth gives the position in time.

2:42.0

The three quantities that give the position in space may be assigned in all sorts of ways.

2:49.0

You might, for instance, take the plane of the equator, the plane of the Meridian of Greenwich,

2:57.6

and the plane of the 90th Meridian, and say how far the airship was from each of these planes.

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