Special Relativity On Space-Time — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [1]

Hawking (2005: 43-4):

Based on the Michelson-Morley experiment, the Irish physicist George FitzGerald and the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz suggested that bodies moving through the ether would contract and that clocks would slow down. This contraction and the slowing down of clocks would be such that all people would measure the same speed for light, no matter how they were moving with respect to the ether. … 

However, in a paper written in 1905, Einstein pointed out that if one could not detect whether or not one was moving through space, the notion of an ether was redundant. Instead, he started from the postulate that the laws of science should appear the same to all freely moving observers. In particular, they should all measure the same speed of light, no matter how fast they were moving. The speed of light is independent of their motion and is the same in all directions.

This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks would measure. Instead, everyone would have his or her own personal time. The times of two people would agree if the people were at rest with respect to each other, but not if they were moving. …

Einstein's postulate that the laws of nature should appear the same to all freely moving observers was the foundation of the theory of relativity, so called because it implied that only relative motion was important.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes. The relative slowing down of the ticking of a clock, for a body moving more quickly through space, corresponds to a relative expansion of the time interval between each tick of the clock. That is, the Special Theory of Relativity holds that the dimension of time expands for a moving body as its velocity increases. At the speed of light, the time expands to infinity.

There is also a suggestion here, though not taken up by Hawking, that as a body moves more quickly, space relatively contracts along the dimension of motion. At the speed of light, this space dimension contracts to zero. This would suggest that a photon moving through a vacuum has relatively no extension along the dimension of motion.