Philosophy of Space and Time: And the Inner Constitution of Nature

PREFACE
In this century we are seeing the decisive breakdown of a widely assumed though paradoxical world-view, which took firm hold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Supposition was that there is only one 'real' space and one 'real' time, all other impressions being mere accompaniments of imagination or thought. Space and time were
the field of ordinary perception; and they were also abstract mathematical fields in which the results of calculations were represented.
Everything that happens was then supposed fully accounted for in terms of the 'primary qualities'-positions, shapes, velocities, masses, etc.-precisely given in nature in the one all-inclusive space and the one inflexible succession of time-instants.
In Whitehead's phrase, everything was 'simply located'. As Einstein put it, space was an infinite 'box' or 'container' in which everything had its place, regardless of what might or might not be observable. What was overlooked was that location means measure; that every measure presupposes a theory and a technique; that measurement means interference and approximation; and that as soon as we look beyond the mere collection of isolated measures and deal with the orderly unfolding of actual experience, nature must be regarded as a
rational whole, transcending the particular spatio-temporal measures and observations, yet in some way also given to us…