Definition talk:Minkowski Spacetime

Equivalence

Clearly equivalence here is problematic, because we have geometer's Minkowski spacetime (any dimension) and physicist's Minkowski spacetime (3+1 dimensions). As always, mathematicians stole the physical notation and generalized to higher dimensions and stripped its material aspects. Also, for physicists, the meaning of time and space are not just geometrical, i.e. direction of time imposes a causal structure of events. For geometers, Minkowski spacetime means that in the metric tensor one diagonal number is negative and the rest are positive. Maybe a disambiguation is needed here?--Julius (talk) 10:34, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Or because one is a sort of variant / generalisation / interpretation of the other, use a subpage-with-transclusion technique? --prime mover (talk) 11:03, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

That would work better. In general, Minkowski space is just an instance of hyperbolic hypersurface, and its dimensions do not have to correspond to any spatial or temporal direction. This appears in physics only when we start rewriting laws of physics (like Maxwell equations) using metric tensors whence we notice that the negative component is along time.--Julius (talk) 11:17, 25 May 2023 (UTC)