Space, Time, and Spacetime - Physical and Philosophical Implications of Minkowski's Unification of Space and Time (Petkov Vesselin)(Paperback)

In 1908 Hermann Minkowski gave the four-dimensional(spacetime) formulationof special relativity 1]. In fact, HenriPoincare 2] rst noticedin1906that the Lorentz transformations had a geometric interpretation as rotations in a four-dimensional space with time as the fourth dimension. However it was Minkowski, who succe- fully decoded the profound message about the dimensionality of the world hidden in the relativity postulate, which re ects the experimental fact that natural laws are the same in all inertial reference frames. Unlike Poincare, Minkowski did not regardspacetime - the uni cation of space and time - as a convenientmathematical space, but insisted that this absolute four-dimensional world, as Minkowski called it, represents physical phenomena and the world more adequately than the relativity postulate: "the word relativity-postulate. . . seems to me very feeble. Since the
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