4D - Space-Time Continuum

Hey Guys…. This is our first post and we wanted it to be something special. So as science lovers we started off with an interesting topic of the 4^th dimension and the famous theory that deals with it the Space-Time continuum.

In 1906, soon after Albert Einstein announced his special theory of relativity, his former college teacher in mathematics, Hermann Minkowski, developed a new scheme for thinking about space and time that emphasized its geometric qualities. In his famous quotation delivered at a public lecture on relativity, he announced that,

"The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

This new reality was that space and time, as physical constructs, have to be combined into a new mathematical/physical entity called 'space-time', because the equations of relativity show that both the space and time coordinates of any event must get mixed together by the mathematics, in order to accurately describe what we see.  Because space consists of 3 dimensions, and time is 1-dimensional, space-time must, therefore, be a 4-dimensional object. While we have the ability to control our experience of first three dimensions(height, width and length) but we do not seem to have the ability to manipulate our experience of time, eventhough physics tells us that it is merely a dimension like others. For humans, time seems to be a one-way street with a strict speed limit.

It is believed to be a 'continuum' because so far as we know, there are no missing points in space or instants in time, and both can be subdivided without any apparent limit in size or duration. So, physicists now routinely consider our world to be embedded in this 4-dimensional Space-Time continuum, and all events, places, moments in history, actions and so on are described in terms of their location in Space-Time. Space-Time does not evolve but just exists.

When we examine a particular object from the stand point of its space-time representation, every particle is located along its world-line. This world-line exists as a complete object which helps us see where a particle is located in space at a particular instant. Once you determine the complete world line of a particle from the forces acting upon it, you have 'solved' for its complete history.  You can slice it here and there to examine what the geometry of space looks like at a particular instant. This Space-Time continuum has proved to be real and a very useful concept.

 This is a series of images showing tesseract in Space-Time.

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