Contents: Ann. Phys. 9-10/2008

• Book ID: 101484136
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 136 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-3804
• DOI: 10.1002/andp.200817013

✦ Synopsis

What is missing from Minkowski's "Raum und Zeit" lecture This contribution tries to highlight the importance of Minkowski's "Raum und Zeit" lecture in a "negative" way, where 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, the article focuses on two issues: (i) why are Poincaré'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?