ABSTRACT
Space-time as conceived in the theory of relativity is a plenum in the sense that it is the ubiquitous metrical field and as such it is obviously a continuum. At the same time it is a system of relations between contiguous events and is nothing at all apart from them. The amorphous, featureless, eventless space-time of pure mathematics is a pure abstraction and does not exist in nature, but even here relations are between terms embedded inextricably in the continuum. In physics, spatio-temporal relations unquestionably answer to the account given above. Their terms are parts of a continuum and the relations between them are the form of the intervening matrix. The events, which are the terms, are not separable from the metrical field, whose structure is simply the web of their mutual relations. Moreover the structure of the field, in varying degrees of complication is what constitutes energy and matter, their interaction being the flow of changes in this structure, which are the events interrelated. The overlap of terms is, therefore, obvious; but what is not so obvious is how, if at all, the spatio-temporal continuum is, or becomes, a scale.
