matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler.  I make no pretence of having withheld from the reader difficulties which are inherent to the subject.  On the other hand, I have purposely treated the empirical physical foundations of the theory in a “step-motherly” fashion, so that readers unfamiliar with physics may not feel like the wanderer who was unable to see the forest for the trees.  May the book bring some one a few happy hours of suggestive thought!

December, 1916
A. Einstein

PART I

THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

PHYSICAL MEANING OF GEOMETRICAL PROPOSITIONS

In your schooldays most of you who read this book made acquaintance with the noble building of Euclid’s geometry, and you remember —­ perhaps with more respect than love —­ the magnificent structure, on the lofty staircase of which you were chased about for uncounted hours by conscientious teachers.  By reason of our past experience, you would certainly regard everyone with disdain who should pronounce even the most out-of-the-way proposition of this science to be untrue.  But perhaps this feeling of proud certainty would leave you immediately if some one were to ask you:  “What, then, do you mean by the assertion that these propositions are true?” Let us proceed to give this question a little consideration.

Geometry sets out form certain conceptions such as “plane,” “point,” and “straight line,” with which we are able to associate more or less definite ideas, and from certain simple propositions (axioms) which, in virtue of these ideas, we are inclined to accept as “true.”  Then, on the basis of a logical process, the justification of which we feel ourselves compelled to admit, all remaining propositions are shown to follow from those axioms, i.e. they are proven.  A proposition is then correct ("true”) when it has been derived in the recognised manner from the axioms.  The question of “truth” of the individual geometrical propositions is thus reduced to one of the “truth” of the axioms.  Now it has long been known that the last question is not only unanswerable by the methods of geometry, but that it is in itself entirely without meaning.  We cannot ask whether it is true that only one straight line goes through two points.  We can only say that Euclidean geometry deals with things called “straight lines,” to each of which is ascribed the property of being uniquely determined by two points situated on it.  The concept “true” does not tally with the assertions of pure geometry, because by the word “true” we are eventually in the habit of designating always the correspondence with a “real” object; geometry, however, is not concerned with the relation of the ideas involved in it to objects of experience, but only with the logical connection of these ideas among themselves.