Spacetime and Reality: Facing the Ultimate Judge

Abstract

Over a hundred years ago in his paper "Space and Time" Hermann Minkowski demonstrated the profound meaning of the relativity postulate - the experimental fact that physical phenomena are the same in all inertial reference frames implies that the Universe is an absolute four-dimensional world in which all moments of time have equal existence due to their belonging to the fourth dimension. Since then there has been no consensus on the reality of this absolute world, which we now call Minkowski spacetime or simply spacetime. I will argue that facing the ultimate judge - the experimental evidence - allows us to settle this issue once and for all.

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Vesselin Petkov
Minkowski Institute

Citations of this work

Why ‘NOW’?Peter J. Riggs - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (1):171-180.

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References found in this work

Time and physical geometry.Hilary Putnam - 1967 - Journal of Philosophy 64 (8):240-247.
On Einstein--Minkowski space--time.Howard Stein - 1968 - Journal of Philosophy 65 (1):5-23.
On relativity theory and openness of the future.Howard Stein - 1991 - Philosophy of Science 58 (2):147-167.
Endurantism, perdurantism and special relativity.Steven Hales & Timothy Johnson - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (213):524–539.

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