Static Interpretation of Space-Time

One of the most interesting aspects of relativity theory for the philosophical-minded consists in the fact that it gave new and surprising in-sights into the nature of time, of that mysterious and seemingly self- contradictory1 being which, on the other hand, seems to form the basis of the world’s and our own existence. The very starting point of special relativity theory consists in the discovery of a new and very astonishing property of time, namely the relativity of simultaneity, which to a large extent implies2 that of succession. The assertion that the events A and B are simultaneous (and, for a large class of pairs of events, also the assertion that A happened before B) loses its objective meaning, in so far as another observer, with the same claim to correctness, can assert that A and B are not simultaneous (or that B happened before A).