Abstract
Over a 100 years ago in his paper Space and Time Hermann Minkowski revealed the profound physical meaning of the relativity postulate—the experimental fact that physical phenomena are the same in all inertial reference frames implies that every inertial frame has its own space and time, which in turn implies that the Universe is an absolute four-dimensional world in which all moments of time have equal existence due to their belonging to the fourth (time) dimension. Since then there has been no consensus on the reality of this absolute world, which we now call Minkowski spacetime or simply spacetime. One might be tempted to interpret this situation in a sense that the question of the dimensionality of the world is so deep that we seem unable to comprehend it fully, which might be a manifestation of the first hints that there might exist some limits of our understanding of the world. I will argue that human abilities to understand the physical world are much greater than what most think by examining the issue of the reality of spacetime and showing that none of the experiments which confirmed the kinematic relativistic effects would be possible if the world were not four-dimensional. Therefore, facing the ultimate judge—the experimental evidence—allows us (i) to realize fully that in 1908 Minkowski had a better (than the present) understanding of the profound physical meaning of Einstein’s special relativity as a theory of an absolute four-dimensional world, and (ii) to settle the issue of the reality of spacetime once and for all.
The views of space and time which I want to present to you arose from the domain of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength.
Minkowski [1]
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- 1.
By “reality of spacetime” I mean, following Minkowski, a real four-dimensional world.
- 2.
This is the Michaelson-Morley experiment which Minkowski mentioned explicitly and which used electromagnetic signals (light) to try to detect the Earth’s motion with respect to the aether. That experiment showed that not only mechanical experiments (discussed and used by Galileo) fail to discover motion with constant velocity, but experiments involving electromagnetic phenomena fail too. The expression “physical phenomena are the same in all inertial frames” simply means that motion with constant velocity cannot be discovered; otherwise, if physical phenomena were different in some inertial frames, that would mean that those frames were in a state of absolute motion.
- 3.
This argument can be also explained in the case of accelerated observers in special relativity [6, pp. 150–152] since an accelerated observer is represented by a curved worldtube in flat spacetime and therefore the presents corresponding to different events of the observer’s worldtube intersect.
- 4.
In Fig. 11.5 the inclined “cross section,” which represents the different three-dimensional meter stick measured by B, appears longer, not shorter, because a fact in the pseudo-Euclidean geometry of spacetime is represented on the Euclidean surface of the paper.
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Petkov, V. (2017). Spacetime and Reality: Facing the Ultimate Judge. In: Wuppuluri, S., Ghirardi, G. (eds) Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44418-5_11
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