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Dear Sir,
Owen Renik's letter (Int. J. Psychoanal., 80: 382-3) prompts me to three responses.
1) Renik says that: ‘Einstein's special theory of relativity is, essentially, a description of the inescapable subjectivity of the observer …’ (p. 383). No. This confuses the ideas of subjectivity and relativity. Many concepts are relational. A true answer to the question of how much a particular person weighs might be, equally, ‘142 pounds’ or ‘65.5 kilograms’. It would make no sense to say merely that she weighs 142, or 65.5. You have to relate her weight to some standard measure. (Encarta informs me that the international prototype of the kilogram is a solid cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy, maintained at a constant temperature at Sèvres, near Paris.) But the sentence specifying her weight in terms of some standard or another is intersubjectively verifiable and objectively true or false.
Certain things are relative to the observer in both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, but not to what the observer (subjectively) thinks. That is, ‘observer’ doesn't mean here what Renik thinks it does. Newtonian Physics tells us the following: if you and I are inside a train, we may both be walking at a speed of one mile an hour, relative to the train, and at a quite different speed (depending on whether or not the train is moving, and how fast), relative to the ground. (You and I, in this example, share the same basic frame of reference. I come back to this idea shortly.) There is nothing subjective about this. On the contrary, these are intersubjective facts about location. The special theory of relativity takes the classical relativity of