Physics Lournal

Powered by 🌱Roam Garden

Another victim was Einstein, whose theory put forth the nature of space and time as relative, as opposed to absolute, which philosophers took as evidence for the position of relativism, which confers less objectivity to things than would be conferred to them without it.

The contradiction here is that while relativity may have shown us that space and time are not absolute, that lack of absoluteness is in fact the objective truth of the world, which as per Spinoza, is the highest objective of man. Relativity is still arguing an objective truth, albeit one about the relative nature of things.

 Additionally, there seems to be a jump made by such philosophers, which is that if the most fundamental aspects of reality are relative, how can anything contained in them have any true objectivity, which is a semi-logical deduction, but the issue is that relativity theory only makes claims about the base layers of physical reality, and the nature of that which is assumed to be relative by way of the theory, exists far and away from where the theory does.