Böcker utgivna av Minkowski Institute Press

Not only the general public, but even students of physics appear to believe that the physics concept of spacetime was introduced by Einstein. This is both unfortunate and unfair. It was Hermann Minkowski (Einstein's mathematics professor) who announced the new four-dimensional (spacetime) view of the world in 1908, which he deduced from experimental physics by decoding the profound message hidden in the failed experiments designed to discover absolute motion. Minkowski realized that the images coming from our senses, which seem to represent an evolving three-dimensional world, are only glimpses of a higher four-dimensional reality that is not divided into past, present, and future since space and all moments of time form an inseparable entity (spacetime). Einstein's initial reaction to Minkowski's view of spacetime and the associated with it four-dimensional physics (also introduced by Minkowski) was not quite favorable: "Since the mathematicians have invaded the relativity theory, I do not understand it myself any more." However, later Einstein adopted not only Minkowski's spacetime physics (which was crucial for Einstein's revolutionary theory of gravity as curvature of spacetime), but also Minkowski's world view as evident from Einstein's letter of condolences to the widow of his longtime friend Besso: "Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Besso left this world on 15 March 1955; Einstein followed him on 18 April 1955. This volume contains Hermann Minkowski's four works, which laid the foundations of spacetime physics. In some sense it can be regarded as a second expanded edition of the first book published by the Minkowski Institute Press - H. Minkowski, Space and Time: Minkowski's papers on relativity (Minkowski Institute Press, Montreal 2012) - which included Minkowski's three papers published by him. Now, in addition to those papers, this volume also contains Minkowski's fourth paper assembled and published by Minkowski's student Max Born in 1910 "A Derivation of the Fundamental Equations for the Electromagnetic Processes in Moving Bodies from the Standpoint of the Theory of Electrons".

This volume contains new publications of A. S. Eddington's famous book Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, written for a wider audience, and two short pieces originally published in Nature - an article on time (The Relativity of Time) and a Letter to the Editor on space ("Space" or "Aether"?). The short Nature publications are included in the volume because they shed additional (and still important today) light on some aspects of the (then) new views of space, time and gravitation. In 1921 in a review in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society Edwin Bidwell Wilson wrote that Eddington's book "is undoubtedly the best general presentation" of general relativity. Today it is still one of the best general presentations because it is written not only by a skilled popularizer of science but also by one of the three (as the legend has it) experts on general relativity at that time.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Einstein's general relativity the Minkowski Institute Press publishes the first English translation of a very rare book on general relativity (its only Russian publication was in 1924), which turned out to be the last book by A. A. Friedmann (co-authored with V. K. Frederiks). This is the first and the only published volume of a five-volume book project on the foundations of the theory of relativity, brutally terminated by the untimely and tragic death of Friedmann on 16 September 1925.Despite the fact that this book was published in 1924 and despite the presence of some unconventional notions and notations in it, this is still a valuable book, because it is written by two deep thinkers, particularly Friedmann who in 1922 had the deepest understanding of the cosmological implications of Einstein's general relativity when he first showed that the Universe may expand (which was later discovered by Hubble). What also makes this book valuable is that Frederiks and Friedmann develop the formalism of tensor calculus from a physical point of view by showing why the ideas of general relativity need that formalism. In this sense the book can be even used for self-study.

Neither general relativity (which revealed that gravity is merely manifestation of the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime) nor modern cosmology would have been possible without the almost simultaneous and independent discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the 19th century by three great mathematicians - Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, János Bolyai and Carl Friedrich Gauss (whose ideas were later further developed by Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann).This volume contains three works by Lobachevsky on the foundations of geometry and non-Euclidean geometry: "Geometry", "Geometrical investigations on the theory of parallel lines" and "Pangeometry". It will be of interest not only to experts and students in mathematics, physics, history and philosophy of science, but also to anyone who is not intimidated by the magnitude of one of the greatest discoveries of our civilization and would attempt to follow (and learn from) Lobachevsky's line of thought, helpfully illustrated by over 130 figures, that led him to the discovery.