Concept
Spacetime
Overview
In physics, spacetime, or the space-time continuum, is a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Spacetime diagrams are useful in visualizing and understanding relativistic effects, such as how different observers perceive where and when events occur.
Until the turn of the 20th century, the assumption had been that the three-dimensional geometry of the universe (its description in terms of locations, shapes, distances, and directions) was distinct from time (the measurement of when events occur within the universe). However, space and time took on new meanings with the Lorentz transformation and special theory of relativity.
In 1908, Hermann Minkowski presented a geometric interpretation of special relativity that fused time and the three spatial dimensions into a single four-dimensional continuum now known as Minkowski space. This interpretation proved vital to the general theory of relativity, wherein spacetime is curved by mass and energy.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
They noted, then, the final term or culminating point ([Greek: telos, akmê]) and set it up as the essential moment: this moment, that language has retained in order to express the whole of the fact, sufficed also for science to characterize it. In the physics of Aristotle, it is by the concepts "high" and "low," spontaneous displacement and forced displacement, own place and strange place, that the movement of a…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Spacetime is; the author is tied to Spacetime in the knowledge graph.
This property of quantities, according to which no part of them is the smallest possible (no part simple), is called their continuity. Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be given, without enclosing it within boundaries (points and moments), consequently, this given part is itself a space or a time.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Spacetime is.
Before dealing further with the special theory of relativity, I want to try to convey to the reader what is involved in the new phrase “space-time,” because that is, from a philosophical and imaginative point of view, perhaps the most important of all the novelties that Einstein has introduced. Suppose you wish to say where and when some event has occurred—say an explosion on an airship—you will have to mention four…
Bertrand Russell, The A B C of Relativity
States what Spacetime is.
Philosophers who discussed Spacetime
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Parmenides
- William Kingdon Clifford
- Roger Penrose
- Karl Jaspers
- Graham Harman
- Milič Čapek
Related ideas
- Elementary particle
- General relativity
- Henri Bergson
- Future
- Gravitational field
- Geometry
- Classical mechanics
- Velocity
- Manifold
- Niels Bohr
- Physics
- Quantum entanglement
- Pythagorean theorem
- Special relativity
- Space
- Time dilation
- Time
- Causality
- Henri Poincaré
- Thought experiment
- Max Born
- Conservation of energy
- Cambridge University Press
- Albert Einstein
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Confirmation holism.