Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
astronomers, meteorologists, lighthouse operators, postal services, ware-
houses and delivery companies, electricity producers, bankers, and industrial-
ists. In short, simultaneity was central to the earth-spanning networks of late
colonialism and industrial capitalism, for the e
cient regulation of produc-
tion and urban life. These factors all represented di
erent moments of the
enormous wave of late nineteenth-century time-space compression: Galison
(2003:175) observes that “Longitude, train tracks, telegraphy, and time-
synchronization reinforced each other. Each showed a di
ff
ff
erent facet of a new
global grid.”
Albert Einstein, surrounded by applications for licenses for new technolo-
gies in the Bern patent of
ce, in a country with a long tradition of making
accurate timepieces, worked at the heart of the theoretical and applied
networks concerned with simultaneity. He extended Poincaré's analysis by
showing, mathematically, that the results of experiments with time and
motion inevitably depended on the viewer's choice of space-time coordinate
de
nitions. With the special theory of relativity that he articulated in 1905,
Einstein showed how time in one moving reference system appeared to slow
down when viewed by another reference system at rest, and in the general
theory of relativity, espoused in 1916, he extended this argument to the
time changes experienced by two or more accelerating bodies. Relativity
views energy and matter as curving four-dimensional space-time so that it
wraps around itself, forming a warped surface over which light rays glide. The
measurement of time was predicated on the observer's location in space, his
or her relative velocity to other places, and the gravitational mass that shaped
the local universe. Thus, gravitational
fi
fields slowed down the speed of light by
warping space and time. “The discovery that the speed of light appeared the
same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of
relativity—and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique
absolute time.... Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the
observer who measured it” (Hawking 1988:143). Relativity repositioned time
and space, suturing them to the materiality of the physical world by empha-
sizing how mass warped and stretched these dimensions around itself. Gravity
therefore was not an independent force but the e
fi
ect of warped space and
time. Moreover, rather than existing independently of their contents, and thus
extending equally throughout the universe, time and space were organized by
the speci
ff
fi
cs of local matter and motion; with Einstein, the “now” became
con
ect, became pinned down by gravity and
inseparable from space, ever-changing and variable in its
fi
ned to the “here.” Time, in e
ff
ow.
Einstein essentially replaced the notion of a universal “time” with multiple
“times,” each of which was just as true as any other. If the distance to an event
is known, an observer can correlate it with his own experience; this calcula-
tion, of course, is di
fl
ff
erent for each observer. Thus events no longer were
embedded in a
fixed time frame; instead, the time of each was relative to the
observer. It was the di
fi
erence in the relative velocities between observer and
observed that led to the perception of time and space, not the distance between
ff
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