Sean Carroll: recommendation

Transcript context

…What about the step of including time as just another dimension, combining space and time, is that a simple mathematical leap as Minkowski suggested? It’s certainly not simple, actually. It’s a profound insight. That’s why I said I think we should give Minkowski more credit than we do. He’s the one who really put the finishing touches on special relativity. Again, many people had talked about how things change when you move close to the speed of light, what Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism predict and so forth, what their symmetries are. People like Lorenz and Fitzgerald and Poincare, there’s a story that goes there. In the usual telling Einstein puts the capstone on it. He’s the one who says, “All of this makes much more sense if there just is no ether. It is undetectable. We don’t know how fast. Everything is relative.” Thus, the name relativity. But he didn’t take the actual final step, which was to realize that the underlying structure that he had invented is best thought of as unifying space and time together. I honestly don’t know what was going through Minkowski’s mind when he thought that. I’m not sure if he was so mathematically adept that it was just clear to him or he was really struggling it and he did trial and error for a while. I’m not sure. Do you, for him or Einstein, visualize the four-dimensional space, try to play with the idea of time is just another dimension?…

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