Despite the influence of this argument on the subsequent generation of philosophers of science, Reichenbach’s analysis of spacetime measurement is plainly inappropriate, manifesting a fallacious tendency to view the generically curved spacetimes of general relativity as stitched together from little bits of flat Minskowski spacetimes. Besides being mathematically inconsistent, this procedure offers no way of providing a non-metaphorical physical meaning for the fundamental metrical tensor \(g_{\