The reader who perseveres will have read one of the most influential papers in the history of physics. The accompanying notes and illustrations should, we hope, make this foundational document of special relativity understandable to anyone with high-school level mathematics. Universal intelligibility was a major goal of the early workers in relativity: Einstein famously not only wrote several popular accounts of his ideas, but even used one such popularisation to introduce a version of his unified field-theory. Minkowski's essay given here -- the work for which he is most remembered outside the world of pure mathematics -- was first given orally to an audience composed of scientists but not primarily of physicists. We hope that this republication of it continues the tradition of making important works of natural philosophy accessible to all.
SOURCES:
- Raum und Zeit by Hermann Minkowski [Physikalische Zeitschrift 10, 104 (1909)]
-
Time and Space
by Hermann Minkowski, tr. Edward H. Carus
[Monist 28, 288 (1918)] This is the translation quoted here.
I have corrected a number of (mostly typographical) errors
and some deviations from the German original, and replaced a
few terms by ones which have become standard -- e.g. "proper
time" instead of "characteristic time" for "Eigenzeit".
I do not know why Carus reversed the order of the nouns in the title.
A
different translation by Meghnad Saha is available at
Wikisource, both as published in 1920 and in a
revised version. I have used this as a source for
image files of
those equations which could not be typeset in HTML,
hence the occasionally odd typography. Since writing
this blog, I have come across a third translation,
by W. Perrett and G. B. Jeffery, in The
Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original
Memoirs [1923? Dover reprint, no date], along with
notes by no less an authority than Arnold Sommerfeld.
- Some useful secondary sources available online:
- Hermann Minkowski and the Postulate of Relativity by Leo Corry [Archive for History of Exact Sciences 51, 281 (1997)]
- Minkowski, Mathematicians, and the Mathematical Theory of Relativity by Scott Walter [1999]
- Hermann Minkowski's Approach to Physics by Scott Walter [Mathematische Semesterberichte 55, 213 (2008)]
- What is missing from Minkowski's "Raum und Zeit" lecture by Thibault Damour [2008/07] What is missing, according to Damour? Well, to start with, Henri Poincaré ...
- Electric charge in hyperbolic motion: the early history by Călin Galeriu [Archive for History of Exact Sciences 71, 363 (2017)]
TIME AND SPACE, by Hermann Minkowski