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Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later

Vesselin Petkov editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Springer

Published:29th Mar '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later cover

This volume is dedicated to the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Hermann Minkowski's paper "Raum und Zeit" in 1909 [1]. The paper presents the textofthetalkMinkowskigaveatthe80thMeetingoftheGermanNaturalScientists and Physicians in Cologne on September 21, 1908. Minkowski's work on the spacetime representation of special relativity had a huge impact on the twentieth century physics, which can be best expressed by merely stating what is undeniable - that modern physics would be impossible wi- out the notion of spacetime. It is suf cient to mention as an example only the fact that general relativity would be impossible without this notion; Einstein succeeded to identifygravitywith the curvatureofspacetime onlywhen he overcamehis initial hostile reactionto Minkowski'sfour-dimensionalrepresentationof special relativity and adopted spacetime as the correct relativistic picture of the world. While there exists an unanimous consensus on the mathematical signi cance of spacetime for theoretical physics, for a hundred years there has been no consensus on the nature of spacetime itself. The rst sign of this continuing controversy was Sommerfeld's remark in his notes on Minkowski's article [2]: "What will be the epistemologicalattitudetowardsMinkowski'sconceptionofthetime-spaceproblem is another question, but, as it seems to me, a question which does not essentially touch his physics".

From the reviews:

“This book celebrates the 100th anniversary of Minkowski’s work on four-dimensional spacetime … . In this work Minkowski introduces spacetime as a new fundamental concept from which space and time can be derived. … All in all this is a very impressive work, not only because of the groundbreaking new ideas and the great impact it has had. It is also nicely written and the language is a very pleasant contrast to the dry style most publications use nowadays.” (Michael Keyl, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1220, 2011)

“Vesselin Petkov, the editor of the volume, has succeeded in assembling a number of interesting, enlightening, and thought-provoking papers, all of them authored by competent experts in their fields, which illuminate various aspects of the concept of Minkowski spacetime. The collection transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theoretical physics, history of science, and philosophical reflection in a most productive way.” (Tilman Sauer, Metascience, February, 2013)

ISBN: 9789048134748

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 1530g

326 pages

2010 ed.