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In physics, spacetime, also called 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 ...
Space Time explores the outer reaches of space, the craziness of astrophysics, the possibilities of sci-fi, and anything else you can think of beyond Planet Earth with our astrophysicist host ...
Space-time, in physical science, single concept that recognizes the union of space and time, first proposed by the mathematician Hermann Minkowski in 1908 as a way to reformulate Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905). Learn more about space-time in this article.
How space-time works. Nowadays, when people talk about space-time, they often describe it as resembling a sheet of rubber. This, too, comes from Einstein, who realized as he developed his theory ...
Atoms of Spacetime. Heat is the random motion of microscopic parts, such as the molecules of a gas. Because black holes can warm up and cool down, it stands to reason that they have parts—or ...
Spacetime may emerge from a more fundamental reality. Figuring out how could unlock the most urgent goal in physics—a quantum theory of gravity
Flat (Minkowski) spacetime is a trivial example, but empty spacetime can also be curved, as demonstrated by Willem de Sitter in 1916. There are even spacetimes whose distant reaches rotate endlessly around the sky relative to an observer's local inertial frame (as discovered by Kurt Gödel in 1949).
It makes a lot of sense in the formalism of Special Relativity, in which, for example, traveling at a different velocity is like rotating in 4-dimensional spacetime. And for about a century, physics has pretty much just assumed that spacetime is a thing, and that space and time aren’t in any fundamental way different.
According to general relativity, the spacetime is a 4-dimensional object that has to obey an equation, called the Einstein equation, which explains how the matter curves the spacetime.
Description: Professor David Kaiser teaches in the physics department at MIT and is also a historian of science. In this guest lecture, he describes how the most accomplished physicists of the mid-to-late 19 th century were thinking about motion of bodies through space and time, and how, at the end of that century, a rather young and very little-known person named Albert Einstein began asking ...