Quotes About Minkowski

It is awkward to think that bacilli and other small organisms did not exist until we invented microscopes to see them, or that other galaxies did not exist until, in the 1920s, we invented telescopes powerful enough to detect them. Similarly, the past does not exist any longer for us, in ordinary perception, but it exists — and so does the future — in the geometry of Minkowski's space-time continuum.

Oh, that Einstein, always skipping lectures... I certainly never would have thought he could do it.

But, as powerful mathematicians like Minkowski and Hilbert found striking harmony between their pure mathematical results and the workings of the physical world, many found the claims for such a harmony hard to resist. Thus, in the early years of the twentieth century, we begin to see why Minkowski's application of complex numbers to the description of space and time was hailed by one physicist as 'one of the greatest revolutions in our accepted views'.

The appearance of a four-dimensional world is due to Minkowski. Einstein showed the relativity of the familiar quantities of physics; Minkowski showed how to recover the absolute by going back to their four-dimensional origin and searching more deeply.

Minkowski spacetime.

But had Minkowski and Einstein not recognized it long before us, our schizophrenic children would have taught us that space-time is a unity that precedes any separate understanding of either category; just as grasping this unity is a precondition for understanding causality.

The mathematical education of the young physicist [Albert Einstein] was not very solid, which I am in a good position to evaluate since he obtained it from me in Zurich some time ago.

By framing the special theory of relativity as a four-dimensional theory set in spacetime, Minkowski showed how time dilation and length contraction could be constructed as rotations that transform space into time.