the adventures of spacetime（时空的冒险）.pdfVIP

The adventures of Spacetime Orfeu Bertolami Instituto Superior T´ecnico, Departamento de F´ısica, 6 Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisboa, Portugal 0 orfeu@cosmos.ist.utl.pt 0 2 p e 1 Introduction S 9 Since the XIX century, it is known, through the work of Lobatchevski, Rie- 1 mann and Gauss, that spaces do not need to have a vanishing curvature. This was for sure a revolution on its own, however, from the point of view of these 2 v mathematicians, the space of our day to day experience, the physical space, 6 was still an essentially a priori concept that preceded all experience and was 0 independent of any physical phenomena. Actually, that was also the view of 0 Newton and Kant with respect to time even though, for this two spacetime 7 explorers, the world was Euclidean. 0 6 As is well known, Leibniz held a very different opinion, as for him space 0 and time were meaningless concepts if it were not for their relation with the / material world. Starting with the concepts of space and time as quantities in- c q trinsically related to matter, Hertz developed, between 1889 and 1894, a new - formulation of mechanics, which culminated in the posthumous publication r g in 1894 of the book Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange : dargestellt. But of course, it was only through the General Theory of Rela- v i