The epistemological foundations of SR

pp. 54-81

in: William L. Craig, The tenseless theory of time, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists had already realized that there was something fundamentally wrong with Newton's analysis of physical time and space. The failure to detect the earth's motion through the aether, which constituted a relative or physical space at rest with respect to metaphysical space,¹ prompted a crisis in physics which compelled men like Lorentz, Larmor, and Poincaré to revise and then abandon the Galilean transformation equations in favor of the relativistic Lorentz transformations. In so doing, they had already sounded the death knell of Newtonian physics, for they had relativized the sensible measures of metaphysical time and space in a way undreamed of by Newton. But they did so without abandoning the notion that there really is a true time and a true space.