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 union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
Hermann Minkowski, 1908, in an address to the Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians
Minkowski was one of Einstein’s teachers, who, commenting on Einstein’s work on relativity,
reputedly said something like, “I never would have expected that student to come up with anything
so clever.”
