Who's Afraid of Special Relativity?

Abstract

It is not easy to state special relativity without begging various questions of interpretation. The following is my attempt to do so. First I say a statement is 'physically necessary' if it is entailed by the correct statements of laws of nature together with any metaphysically necessary truths. Next I assume that there are many ways of assigning coordinates t, x, y, z to events. Then by a 'relative transformation' of coordinates, I mean one that preserves the quasi-metric:- (t₁–t₂)² + (x₁–x₂)² + (y₁– y₂)² + (z₁– z₂)².Then special relativity tells us that if S is any physically necessary statement then so is S´ the result of systematically replacing t, x, y, z by t´, x´, y´ and z´.