What is ‘Minkowski space’?
In: Mathematics
This is gonna require a bit of abstract thought.
If you have a 2D graph with an X axis and a Y axis, you can choose a point, draw a line to it from the origin, and determine it’s X components and it’s Y components.
You’ll notice that this makes a triangle, specifically a 90° triangle.
But what if you kept that triangle in place, but started shifting and rotating the grid the triangle is on?
Well, the triangle isn’t changing. No matter what happens to the graph beneath, the triangle is unchanged.
What does change however, is the X and Y components.
But you can always find the true length of the hypotenuse by using Pythagorean theorm.
Even if X and Y are changing, the hypotenuse never does.
Well, if you think of Space as X and Time as Y, then you can move through space in ways that change how space is viewed and change how time is viewed, but there is some hypotenuse called the “SpaceTime Interval” that is absolute. Even if two people disagree on Space and disagree on Time, they always agree on the SpaceTime interval.
Minkowski Space is the “graph” that Space and Time are plotted on.
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