Uncertain on Principle: combining lines of archaeological evidence to create chronologies

Abstract

First paragraph: The world of ‘absolute, true, and mathematical time', which ‘of itself, flows equably, without reference to anything external' (Newton 1687) was finally killed in the trenches of the First World War, whence Schwarzschild (1916) proposed the first solution to Einstein's general relativity field equations. From now on, space and time were inextricably linked; the past, the future, and simultaneity became relative and dependent on the reference frame of the observer (Einstein 1905; Minkowski 1908); and space-time itself became dynamic, bent by gravity relative to the position of the observer, and deformed by mass and speed (Einstein 1915). Space and time are now not merely the arena in which the drama of the universe is acted out but part of the cast.