Minkowski's Work

Albert Einstein presented the theories of special relativity and general relativity in groundbreaking publications that either contained no formal references to previous literature, or referred only to a small number of his predecessors for fundamental results on which he based his theories, most notably to the work of Hendrik Lorentz for special relativity, and to the work of Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and Ernst Mach for general relativity.

This note is by no means a comprehensive study of Minkowski's space-time formalism of special relativity.

Vesselin Petkov writes: "Minkowski's contributions to modern physics have not been fully and appropriately appreciated. […] Einstein called Minkowski's approach 'superfluous learnedness'. Also, Sommerfeld's recollection of what Einstein said on one occasion can provide further indication of his initial attitude towards Minkowski's development of the implications of the equivalence of the times of observers in…

What is it about Einstein that we find so fascinating? One side is that his thought and achievement seems so far above our mundane sphere that we are inspired merely reflecting on him.

Hermann Minkowski (22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) was a German mathematician and professor. He showed in 1907 that the special theory of relativity of 1905, developed by his former student Albert Einstein, could be understood geometrically as a theory of four-dimensional space-time, now known as the "Minkowski spacetime".

In the early years of his scientific career, Albert Einstein considered mathematics to be a mere tool in the service of physical intuition.

Physics at the end of the nineteenth century found itself in crisis: there were perfectly good theories of mechanics (Newton) and electromagnetism (Maxwell), but they did not seem to agree. Light was known to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it did not obey the same laws of mechanics as matter.

Chapter 17. Minkowski’s Four-Dimensional Space. Einstein, Albert. 1920. Relativity: The Special and General Theory

Students find physics difficult—I am thinking of first-year undergraduate university physics majors. I found it difficult myself, and it took me almost 40 years of teaching physics to fully understand the reasons for the perceived "difficulty."

Hermann Minkowski: German mathematician who developed the geometrical theory of numbers and who made numerous contributions to number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity. His...

Minkowski Space elegantly describes Special relativity as consequences of the makeup of space and time, and how they mix.

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How is the ideology about time and imaginary time different for Einstein and Stephen Hawking? This question was originally answered on Quora by Paul Mainwood.

Albery Einstein first presented his general theory of relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in November 1915, 10 years after the special theory of relativity. Convention has it that if he had not come up with the special theory in 1905, someone else would have done so within a year or two.

Hermann Minkowski was a mathematician that lived in the late 19 th century. He concentrated his work on topics such as "pure" mathematics and he entertained himself with quadratic forms and continued fractions.

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