Reading Comprehension Passage 31 MCQ Test With Answers – WHAT HAPPENS AND WHAT IS OBSERVED

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WHAT HAPPENS AND WHAT IS OBSERVED

A certain type of superior person is fond of asserting that "everything is relative." This is, of course, nonsense, because, if everything were relative, there would be nothing for it to be relative to. However, without falling into metaphysical absurdities, it is possible to maintain that everything in the physical world is relative to an observer. This view, true or not, is not that adopted by the "theory of relativity." Perhaps the name is unfortunate; certainly, it has led philosophers and uneducated people into confusion. They imagine that the new theory proves everything in the physical world to be relative, whereas, on the contrary, it is wholly concerned to exclude what is relative and arrive at a statement of physical laws that shall in no way depend upon the circumstances of the observer...

Both psychology and physics, from their different angles, are compelled to emphasize the respects in which one man's perception of a given occurrence differs from another man's. Some of these differences are due to differences in the brains or minds of the observers, some to differences in their sense-organs, and some to differences of the physical situation: these three kinds may be called respectively psychological, physiological, and physical... The kind that concerns us here is the purely physical kind. Physical differences between two observers will be preserved when the observers are replaced by cameras or recording machines and can be reproduced in a film or on the gramophone...

If there were no reality in the physical world, but only a number of dreams dreamed by different people, we should not expect to find any laws connecting the dreams of one man with the dreams of another. It is the close connection between the perceptions of one man and the roughly simultaneous perceptions of another that makes us believe in a common external origin of the different related perceptions. Physics accounts both for the likenesses and for the differences between different people's perceptions of what we call the "same" occurrence. But in order to do this, it is first necessary for the physicist to find out just what the likenesses are. They are not quite those traditionally assumed because neither space nor time separately can be taken as strictly objective. What is objective is a kind of mixture of the two called "space-time."

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity.

The proposition, "Everything is relative," is not viable, because

The name chosen for the "theory of relativity" is

The Theory of Relativity would rely on data obtained through

We need some measure of objectivity, and this may be found in the concept of

Bertrand Russell