 As Dorling (1978) first pointed out, there is a sense in which the standard absolutist arguments against ‘strict’ relationism using rotating objects (buckets or globes) fail in the context of STR. Maudlin (1993) used the same considerations to show that there is a way of recasting relationism in STR that appears to be successful. STR incorporates certain novelties concerning the nature of time and space, and how they mesh together; perhaps the best-known examples are the phenomena of ‘length contraction’, ‘time dilation’, and the ‘relativity of  simultaneity.’[4]  In STR both spatial distances and time intervals between events – when measured in the standard ways – are frame-relative (observers in different states of motion, i.e. at rest in different reference frames, will ‘disagree’ about their sizes). The standard classical relationist starting point – the configuration of relative distances between the existing bodies at a moment of time – does not exist, at least not as an objective, observer- or frame-independent set of facts. Because of this, when considering what spatial or temporal relations a relationist should postulate as fundamental, it is arguably most natural to restrict oneself to the frame-invariant spatiotemporal ‘distance’ between events in spacetime. This is given by the interval between two points:  \([\Delta x^2 + \Delta y^2 + \Delta z^2 - \Delta t^2]\) – the four-dimensional analog of the Pythagorean theorem, for spacetime distances. If one regards the spacetime interval relations between point-masses-at-times as one’s basis, on which spacetime is built up as an ideal entity (analogously to how Leibniz thought of 3-d space as an ideal entity abstracted from spatial distance relations), then with only mild caveats relationism works: the spacetime interval relations suffice to uniquely fix how the material systems can be embedded (up to isomorphism) in the ‘Minkowski’ spacetime of STR. The modern variants of Newton’s bucket and globes arguments no longer stymie the relationist because (for example) the spacetime interval relations among bits of matter in Newton’s bucket at rest are quite different from the spacetime interval relations found among those same bits of matter after the bucket is rotating. For example, the spacetime interval relation between a bit of water near the side of the bucket, at one time, and itself (say) a second later is smaller than the interval relation between a center-bucket bit of water and itself one second later (times referred to inertial-frame clocks). The upshot is that, unlike the situation in classical physics, a non-rotating body cannot have all the same spatiotemporal relations among its parts as a similar body in rotation. We cannot put a body or system into a state of rotation (or other acceleration) without thereby changing the spacetime interval relations between the various bits of matter at different moments of time, compared to what they would have been if the body had remained non-accelerated or non-rotated. The facts about rotation and acceleration, thus, supervene on spacetime interval relations.[5] 