A Place for Plastic Space?

Abstract

Circumstances on the surface of the earth, for various more or less accidental reasons, suggest conceptions which turn out to be inaccurate, although they have come to seem like necessities of thought. The most important of these circumstances is that most objects on the earth's surface are fairly persistent and nearly stationary from a terrestrial point of view. If this were not the case the idea of going on a journey would not seem so definite as it does. If you want to travel from King's Cross to Edinburgh you know that you will find Kings Cross where it always has been, that the railway line will take the course that it did when you last made the journey and that Waverley Station in Edinburgh will not have walked up to the Castle. You therefore say and think that you have travelled to Edinburgh, not mat Edinburgh has travelled to you. The success of this common-sense point of view depends on a number of things which are really of the nature of luck. Suppose all the houses in London were perpetually moving about like a swarm of bees; suppose railways moved and changed their shape like avalanches; and finally suppose that material objects were perpetually being formed and dissolved like clouds. There is nothing impossible in these suppositions. But obviously what we call a journey to Edinburgh would have no meaning in such a world. You would begin, no doubt, by asking the taxi-driver: ‘Where is King's Cross this morning?’ At the station you would have to ask a similar question about Edinburgh, but the booking clerk would reply: ‘What part of Edinburgh do you mean, sir? Princes' Street has gone to Glasgow, the Castle has moved up into the Highlands, and Waverley Station is under water in the middle of the Firth of Forth.’ And on the journey the stations would not be staying quiet, but some would be travelling North, some South, some East, some West, perhaps much faster man the train. Under these circumstances you would not be able to say where you were at any moment. Indeed the whole notion that one is always in some definite place is due to the fortunate immobility of most of the large objects on the earth's surface (Russell, 1958, 11—12).