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The Minkowski distance or Minkowski metric is a metric in a normed vector space which can be considered as a generalization of both the Euclidean distance and the Manhattan distance. It is named after the Polish mathematician Hermann Minkowski .
Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) found that the theory of special relativity could be best understood as a four-dimensional space, since known as the Minkowski spacetime.. In physics, Minkowski space (or Minkowski spacetime) (/ m ɪ ŋ ˈ k ɔː f s k i,-ˈ k ɒ f-/ [1]) is the main mathematical description of spacetime in the absence of gravitation.
The Minkowski content (named after Hermann Minkowski), or the boundary measure, of a set is a basic concept that uses concepts from geometry and measure theory to generalize the notions of length of a smooth curve in the plane, and area of a smooth surface in space, to arbitrary measurable sets.
In general relativity, the metric tensor (in this context often abbreviated to simply the metric) is the fundamental object of study. The metric captures all the geometric and causal structure of spacetime , being used to define notions such as time, distance, volume, curvature, angle, and separation of the future and the past.
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 numbers are the components of the Minkowski metric. For this article we fix the signature to be mostly minus , that is, ( + , − , − , − ) {\displaystyle (+,-,-,-)} . The Dirac algebra is then the linear span of the identity, the gamma matrices γ μ {\displaystyle \gamma ^{\mu }} as well as any linearly independent products of the ...
In a light-cone coordinate system, two of the coordinates are null vectors and all the other coordinates are spatial. The former can be denoted + and and the latter .. Assume we are working with a (d,1) Lorentzian signature.
where the curly brackets {,} represent the anticommutator, is the Minkowski metric with signature (+ − − −), and is the 4 × 4 identity matrix. This defining property is more fundamental than the numerical values used in the specific representation of the gamma matrices.