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Books > Science & Mathematics > Physics > Relativity physics
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Space, Time, and Spacetime - Physical and Philosophical Implications of Minkowski's Unification of Space and Time (Paperback, 2010 ed.)
Loot Price: R2,937
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Space, Time, and Spacetime - Physical and Philosophical Implications of Minkowski's Unification of Space and Time (Paperback, 2010 ed.)
Series: Fundamental Theories of Physics, 167
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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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 pos- late
comes to mean that only the four-dimensional world in space and
time is given by the phenomena...I prefer to call it the postulate
of the absolute world"[3]. The impact of Minkowski's ideas on the
twentieth century physics has been so immense that one cannot
imagine modern physics without the notion of spacetime. It would
hardly be an exaggeration to say that spacetime has been the
greatest discoveryinphysicsofall times.
Theonlyotherdiscoverythatcomesclosetospa- time is Einstein's
general relativity, which revealed that gravity is a manifestation
of the curvature of spacetime. But it was the discovery of
spacetime, which paved the way for this deep understanding of what
gravity really is. Einstein saw the link
betweenthegeometryofspacetimeandgravitationonlyafterheovercamehis
initial hostile attitude toward the notion of spacetime.
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