Observer (special Relativity) - History

History

Einstein made frequent use of the word "observer" (Beobachter) in his original 1905 paper on special relativity and in his early popular exposition of the subject. However he used the term in its vernacular sense, referring for example to "the man at the railway-carriage window" or "observers who take the railway train as their reference-body" or "an observer inside who is equipped with apparatus". Here the reference body or coordinate system—a physical arrangement of metersticks and clocks which covers the region of spacetime where the events take place—is distinguished from the observer—an experimenter who assigns spacetime coordinates to events far from himself by observing (literally seeing) coincidences between those events and local features of the reference body.

This distinction between observer and the observer's "apparatus" like coordinate systems, measurement tools etc. was dropped by many later writers, and today it is common to find the term "observer" used to imply an observer's associated coordinate system (usually assumed to be a coordinate lattice constructed from an orthonormal right-handed set of spacelike vectors perpendicular to a timelike vector (a frame field), see Doran). Where Einstein referred to "an observer who takes the train as his reference body" or "an observer located at the origin of the coordinate system", this group of modern writers says, for example, "an observer is represented by a coordinate system in the four variables of space and time" or "the observer in frame S finds that a certain event A occurs at the origin of his coordinate system". However, there is no unanimity on this point, with a number of authors continuing a preference for distinguishing between observer (as a concept related to state of motion) from the more abstract general mathematical notion of coordinate system (which can be, but need not be, related to motion). This approach places more emphasis on the many choices for description open to an observer. The observer is then identified with an observational reference frame, rather than with the combination of coordinate system, measurement apparatus and state of motion. See, for example, Kumar and Barve and others:

Coordinate system is frequently alternatively referred to as reference frame, or frame. … we shall use the latter (frame) when emphasizing … state of motion, rather than the scales of the coordinates. In this sense, the study of one reference frame yields the characters of a family of coordinate systems of the same kind (e.g. of the same motional state).

— J X Zheng-Johansson and Per-Ivar Johansson: Unification of Classical, Quantum and Relativistic Mechanics and of the Four Forces p. 13

It also has been suggested that the term "observer" is antiquated, and should be replaced by an observer team (or family of observers) in which each observer makes observations in their immediate vicinity, where delays are negligible, cooperating with the rest of the team to set up synchronized clocks across the entire region of observation, and all team members sending their various results back to a data collector for synthesis.