At the recent Boston meeting of the American Physical Society there was so much general interest in the principle of relativity and so many questions were asked me personally by those who had given the subject very little attention, that it seems timely to give a brief introduction to the subject on a somewhat simpler basis than I think has yet been attempted. The method employs several of the "non-mathematical" conceptions first introduced by Lewis and Tolman, but I think the demonstrations will be found even simpler than theirs.
The principle of relativity is one attempt, and by far the most successful attempt as yet, to explain the failure of all experiments designed to detect the earth's motion through space, by its effect on terrestrial phenomena. It generalizes this universal negative result into its first postulate, which is, the uniform translatory motion of any system can not be detected by an observer traveling with the system and making observations on it alone.
The second postulate is that the velocity of light is independent of the relative velocity of the source of light and observer.
At the very outset, it is important to realize that we have no long-standing experience with systems moving with velocities comparable with that of light, and therefore that primitive intuition may not be the very best guide in first introducing us to them. We might easily imagine a peasant scorning the suggestion that the dimensions of a rigid body changed with the temperature, and declaring, on being
