It is often said that the language of science is an extension or refinement of the language of ordinary life, because scientific concepts, no matter how sophisticated they may be, must ultimately be explainable by means of concepts used in the ordinary experiences of daily life.

This is certainly true for the scientific concept of simultaneity because the term “simultaneous” was used in ordinary language long before it became the object of philosophical or scientific inquiry. Moreover, the notion of simultaneity must have been in the mind of humankind even before its conscious articulation, for when at the dawn of civilization prehistoric man observed the stars in the sky and thought that they were where he saw them, he conceived the idea of an all-pervasive “now.” In this conception his mind implicitly applied the notion of distant simultaneity as a necessary component in the mental process of distinguishing his self from the world that surrounds him.

This does not mean, however, that he already possessed a distinctive verbal expression for this abstract notion at this early stage. The question of how he performed the transition to such an articulated expression is related, of course, to the general problem of the origin and development of language. We focus, therefore, on only a few metalinguistic remarks that are relevant to the notion of simultaneity. Particularly relevant to our subject is the claim made by Edward Sapir and his disciple Benjamin Lee Whorf that “all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar.”^[1]

Footnotes