What is missing from Minkowski's "Raum und Zeit" lecture

Details What is missing from Minkowski's "Raum und Zeit" lecture What is missing from Minkowski's "Raum und Zeit" lecture

2008-07-08

arxiv.org/abs/0807.1300v1

Physics

History and Philosophy of Physics

18 pages, to appear in the special (Sept/Oct 2008) issue of Annalen der Physik (Berlin) commemorating H. Minkowski's 1908 lect

Scientific paper

10.1002/andp.200810315

This contribution tries to highlight the importance of Minkowski's ``Raum und Zeit'' lecture in a ``negative'' way, where {\it negative} is taken in the photographic sense of reversing lights and shades. Indeed, we focus on the ``shades'' of Minkowski's text, i.e. what is missing, or misunderstood. In particular, we focus on two issues: (i) why are Poincar\'e's pioneering contributions to four-dimensional geometry not quoted by Minkowski (while he abundantly quoted them a few months before the Cologne lecture)?, and (ii) did Minkowski fully grasp the physical (and existential) meaning of ``time'' within spacetime? We think that this ``negative'' approach (and the contrast between Poincar\'e's and Minkowski's attitudes towards physics) allows one to better grasp the boldness of the {\it revolutionary} step taken by Minkowski in his Cologne lecture.

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