It is often convenient to name points in spacetime using coordinates, and a particular type of naming, chosen by Einstein and Minkowski, is the default in special relativity. I’ll refer to the coordin...It is often convenient to name points in spacetime using coordinates, and a particular type of naming, chosen by Einstein and Minkowski, is the default in special relativity. I’ll refer to the coordinates of this system as Minkowski coordinates, and they’re what I have in mind throughout this book when I use letters like t and x without further explanation.
Hermann Minkowski discovered that if the temporal (dt) and spatial (dx, dy, dz) separation between two events are combined appropriately, the resulting quantity, the spacetime interval, is the same f...Hermann Minkowski discovered that if the temporal (dt) and spatial (dx, dy, dz) separation between two events are combined appropriately, the resulting quantity, the spacetime interval, is the same for all observers. This result is the metric of the four-dimensional flat spacetime that obeys Special Relativity. This metric is referred to as the Minkowski metric.
