Petkov, Vesselin
(2023)
The Quadruple Scientific Tragedy involved in the Discovery of Spacetime Physics.
The Origin of Spacetime Physics (2nd ed.).
pp. 257-276.
ISSN ISBN: 978-1-989970-99-7
Abstract
The advent of spacetime physics came at the price of four different scientific tragedies involving Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski whose work essentially laid the foundations of spacetime physics. Lorentz' and Poincaré's scientific tragedies had the same cause - both Lorentz and Poincaré regarded the new theoretical entities they introduced in physics as pure mathematical abstractions that did not represent anything in the physical world. Einstein's rather subtle scientific tragedy has to do with his unclear and, in some cases, even incorrect views on a number of subjects that might have led to confusions and misconceptions some of which still persist. Minkowski's scientific tragedy is of different kind - he arrived independently at what Einstein called special relativity and at the notion of spacetime, but Einstein and Poincaré published first while Minkowski had been developing the full-blown four-dimensional formalism of spacetime physics; he did not publish his results earlier "because he wished first to work out the mathematical structure in all its splendour" (M. Born).
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