Western Cosmology and the Becoming of Possibility: 7 Relativity and the Expanding Universe: Einstein and the Contingency of Space-Time

The Newtonian cosmos of absolute space, time, and calculable necessity was decisively restructured in the early twentieth century through Einstein’s theories of relativity. Where Newton had construed possibility as law-governed motion within a fixed stage, Einstein revealed that the stage itself — space and time — is dynamic, relational, and contingent.

Special relativity displaced the notion of absolute reference: all motion is relative to frames of observation, and the speed of light functions as a universal constraint. Possibility, in this construal, is not merely calculable in mechanical terms but perspectival, tied to the relational conditions of observers embedded within the cosmos. Time dilates, lengths contract, and simultaneity dissolves into perspectival difference.

General relativity extended this insight, recasting gravity not as a force but as the curvature of spacetime. Matter and energy shape the geometry of the cosmos, and this geometry in turn conditions the trajectories of matter and light. Potential is thus deeply contingent: what is possible in one region of spacetime depends on the relational configuration of mass, energy, and curvature. The cosmos becomes a dynamic field in which possibility is continually reshaped by the interplay of matter and geometry.

The modulatory voice of Hermann Minkowski formalised this shift through the four-dimensional conception of spacetime. By fusing space and time into a single manifold, Minkowski provided the mathematical architecture within which Einstein’s theories could be expressed and extended. This geometrical formalisation allowed possibility to be construed not as unfolding upon an absolute background, but as structured within the relational fabric of spacetime itself.

The expansion of the universe, revealed through astronomical observation and predicted by relativistic models, further deepened this reorientation. The cosmos is not static or closed; it is evolving, stretching, and opening new horizons of possibility across cosmic time. Where Newton’s vision compressed possibility into determinism, relativity dispersed it into relational contingency and historical unfolding.

In sum, relativity recasts the cosmos as a field of dynamic relation, where potential is neither absolute nor fixed but emerges from the perspectival, contingent interplay of spacetime and matter. Construal itself becomes historical and situated, mirroring the very structures it seeks to apprehend.