Dear Colleagues,
The Minkowski Institute Press (http://www.minkowskiinstitute.org/mip/books/) will publish the volume “Hermann Minkowski and the Reality of Spacetime” with papers on whether or not Minkowski’s arguments in his 1908 lecture “Space and Time” (based on the experimental evidence at that time) unambiguously prove that spacetime is real.
The reason for the publication of this volume is that since Minkowski’s lecture, unlike the adoption of the developed by him four-dimensional (spacetime) formalism, Minkowski’s arguments for the reality of spacetime have been ignored. Even worse – some physicists (unfortunately even relativists) claim that Minkowski’s four-dimensional formalism is “just a description” and / or that the question of the reality of spacetime belongs to philosophy. But the majority of relativists appear to understand well that the dimensionality of the (macroscopic) world is not “just a description” and it is physics that determines it, not philosophy.
The only requirement for submitted papers is that they must explicitly address Minkowski’s arguments. Why? See the abstract at http://www.minkowskiinstitute.org/mip/books/WhySpacetimeIsReal.pdf.
If interested please contact: mip[AT]minkowskiinstitute.org
Vesselin Petkov
Minkowski Institute
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
vpetkov[AT]minkowskiinstitute.org
http://spacetimecentre.org/vpetkov/