Word: continuum
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...occupies the opening chapters, and how it was devised by Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and others to account for phenomena as they saw them. Next is detailed the new facts about light and magnetics, and its replacement by the current theories of four dimensions, quanta, relativity, and the time-space continuum. Each problem is outlined as it arises in a logical approach, and each theory gets its day in court, with the difficulties that led to its formation, the events it explains, and the new difficulties that lead to its revision and rejection...
...poor Irish sailor, Sullivan was one of the world's four or five most brilliant interpreters of physics to the world of common men-physics being a prosaic name for that vast branch of science which embraces the giddiest reaches of the universe, the four-dimensional time-space continuum of Relativity, the hidden dance and pulsations of electrons. He was also a novelist, a musician, a philosopher-above all, a dreamer...
...third, found that the classic Relativity equations could be altered to take particles and electric fields into account with no more drastic change than a simple elimination of denominators. The solutions came out free of "singularities," and they described a space radically different from the old four-dimensional continuum. The new space was a system of two identical "sheets" joined here & there by what Dr. Einstein and his associate deemed best to call "bridges." The bridges turned out to be particles. The properties of one bridge identified it as a particle with mass but no electric charge, like the hypothetical...
...concept of Matter preceded his concept of Space. Euclid's geometry was purely concerned with the relative position of concrete bodies, without reference to any continuum through which they moved. Not until Descartes (1596-1650) invented analytical geometry was absolute, continuous Space conceived...