Vol. 6, Doc. 44a. "The Principal Ideas of the Theory of Relativity"
Dp- id
[after December 1916][1]
Ask an intelligent man who is not a scholar what space and time are, and he will perhaps answer as follows. If we imagine all physical things, all stars, all light taken out of the universe, what then remains is something like a giant vessel without walls called "space." With respect to what is happening in the world, it plays the same role as the stage in a theater performance. In this space, in this vessel without walls, there is an eternally uniformly occurring tick-tock that, however, only ghosts, but those everywhere can hear; that is "time." Most natural scientists, up to the present, had this conception about the essence of space and time, even though they did not phrase it in such naive terms as we just did for the sake of simplicity.
Based upon this conception one is inclined to make immediate sense of the following statements. Two eruptions of Mount Vesuvius occur at different times but at the same place (that is, at the crater of Mount Vesuvius). The lighting-up of two distant "new stars" occurs at the same time but at different locations. It has long been known that statements of the first kind (on equi-locality) make no sense.
Indeed, the earth rotates about its axis, moves around the sun, and furthermore, moves together with the sun toward the constellation of H…