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1 From Experience to Spacetime I might revel in the world of intelligibility which still remains to me, but alt hough I have an idea of this world, yet I have not the least knowledge of it, no r can I ever attain to such knowledge with all the efforts of my natural faculty of reason. It is only a something that remains when I have eliminated everythin g belonging to the senses but this something I know no further There must here be a total absence of motive - unless this idea of an intelligible world is itself the motive but to make this intelligible is precisely the problem that we cannot solve. Immanuel Kant

We ordinarily take for granted the existence through time of objects moving acco rding to fixed laws in three-dimensional space, but this is a highly abstract mo del of the objective world, far removed from the raw sense impressions that comp rise our actual experience. This model may be consistent with our sense impressi ons, but it certainly is not uniquely determined by them. For example, Ptolemy a nd Copernicus constructed two very different conceptual models of the heavens ba sed on essentially the same set of raw sense impressions. Likewise Weber and Max well synthesized two very different conceptual models of electromagnetism to acc ount for a single set of observed phenomena. The fact that our raw sense impress ions and experiences are (at least nominally) compatible with widely differing c oncepts of the world has led some philosophers to suggest that we should dispens e with the idea of an "objective world" altogether, and base our physical theori es on nothing but direct sense impressions, all else being merely the products o f our imaginations. Berkeley expressed the positivist identification of sense im pressions with objective existence by the famous phrase "esse est percipi" (to b e is to be perceived). However, all attempts to base physical theories on nothin g but raw sense impressions, avoiding arbitrary conceptual elements, invariably founder at the very start, because we have no sure means of distinguishing sense impressions from our thoughts and ideas. In fact, even the decision to make suc h a distinction represents a significant conceptual choice, one that is not stri ctly necessary on the basis of experience.

The process by which we, as individuals, learn to recognize sense impressions in duced by an external world, and to distinguish them from our own internal though ts and ideas, is highly complicated, and perhaps ultimately inexplicable. As Ein stein put it (paraphrasing Kant) the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehe nsibility . Nevertheless, in order to examine the epistemological foundations of a ny physical theory, we must give some consideration to how the elements of the t heory are actually derived from our raw sense impressions, without automatically interpreting them in conventional terms. On the other hand, if we suppress ever y pre-conceived notion, including ordinary rules of reasoning, we can hardly hop e to make any progress. We must