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Minkowski space is a pseudo-Euclidean space equipped with an isotropic quadratic form called the spacetime interval or the Minkowski norm squared. An event in Minkowski space for which the spacetime interval is zero is on the null cone of the origin, called the light cone in Minkowski space.
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 ...
The interval imparts information about the causal structure of spacetime. When <, the interval is timelike and the square root of the absolute value of is an incremental proper time. Only timelike intervals can be physically traversed by a massive object.
The interval, s 2, between two events is defined as: = (spacetime interval), where c is the speed of light, and Δr and Δt denote differences of the space and time coordinates, respectively, between the events.
Writing the coordinates in column vectors and the Minkowski metric η as a square matrix ′ = [′ ′ ′ ′], = [], = [] the spacetime interval takes the form (superscript T denotes transpose) = = ′ ′ and is invariant under a Lorentz transformation ′ = where Λ is a square matrix which can depend on parameters.
In Einstein's theory of relativity, the path of an object moving relative to a particular frame of reference is defined by four coordinate functions x μ (τ), where μ is a spacetime index which takes the value 0 for the timelike component, and 1, 2, 3 for the spacelike coordinates.
The Poincaré group consists of all coordinate transformations of Minkowski space that do not change the spacetime interval between events.For example, if everything were postponed by two hours, including the two events and the path you took to go from one to the other, then the time interval between the events recorded by a stopwatch that you carried with you would be the same.
The formal definition of proper time involves describing the path through spacetime that represents a clock, observer, or test particle, and the metric structure of that spacetime. Proper time is the pseudo-Riemannian arc length of world lines in four-dimensional spacetime. From the mathematical point of view, coordinate time is assumed to be ...