Minkowski's formulation makes rather great demands on the reader in its mathematical aspects.
Minkowski's insight is that the time that you measure when you're moving through spacetime is exactly or almost exactly like the distance
Minkowski's equation helps you do it for relativistic spacetime.
when Minkowski really laid it out in a strict spacetime.
So Minkowski had been following along Einstein's progress.
And Minkowski was the one who said, look, I can think of a more elegant mathematical formulation of your theory.
And Minkowski says, if you think about things that way everything in special relativity makes sense.
But Minkowski says, that's separate from what we call the proper time, here labeled tau, the Greek letter tau.
and Minkovsky figured out that space and time are both two different ways of slicing up spaceime, what does that mean? What does that mean like in our guts, right? What does it visually
by the name of Minkowski, who looked at Einstein's equations. Minkowski was a little bit more mathematically inclined than Einstein, and he saw that if you look at the equations, you have basically
Her grandma had minks on the farm.
Then Rob Minkoff, who was the director of "The Lion King," went.
It's the minke whale.
Particularly bad smelling minke whales?
It's a minke whale, so I think that's how it started, is what I'm told.
And when Minkowski says, "I have some new math that unifies space and time based on Einstein's theories," Einstein himself was like, "Yeah, I don't need that.
When Einstein and Minkowski figured out that space and time are both two different ways of slicing up spacetime, what does that mean?
And I did it with Mink Stole, who's been my friend for 50 years, and we took it 50 years ago together.
associated with fox fur and mink fur.
And what Einstein and then Minkowski later said is, the time that you personally experienced is not universal.
This minus sign is obviously different in Minkowskian geometry versus Euclidean geometry.
Riemann didn't know about Minkowski's spacetime, but he knew about other examples.
The experience that you describe in doing that with Mink , and you had another friend there.
Because however grand and covered with ermine and mink I might be, I am going to die.
So let's be a little bit more quantitative about what Minkowski was actually saying.
It's given by this thing called the Minkowski metric.
it was named after a Norwegian whaler named Minke.
about her but she was beautiful drove a fancy car she wore a mink coat and all
in the old days they'd give recognition to a male executive would be a mink stole for his wife.
And there she is luxuriously draped on the seat with her beautiful mink coat.
Nobody knows why, but the dwarf minke whales there become incredibly inquisitive to boats and people in the water.
And before, we sort of held hands in the corniest way and Mink just said, if anybody finds God, please keep it
Yes, it was a shock to see my mother encased in mink on "The Queen Mary."
It was a very secretive world, and it was run by wealthy women in mink coats that had keys to all the best apartments
Who on the Eastern seaboard is struck by the absence of migrating gray whales or nesting sea turtles or playful and clever sea mink or river-frothing runs
When I was a kid, teenagers would actually get their spending money by trapping foxes and mink and beavers and stuff.
I would think, especially when it seems that Norway-- and Iceland are also hunting mink whales and almost the same amount, that if I was in Japan,
time with a unique kind of geometry, which we now call Minkowski spacetime, by the way.
If you think that spacetime has a geometry, a la Minkowski, what about modifying that geometry?
You have Pythagoras' theorem for Euclidean space, and you have Minkowski's equation for relativistic spacetime.
Well, my ex-professor, Minkowski, says that spacetime has a geometry.
Some of these folks in this protest are still with us and still active in bicycling, including one particular person, Jessica Mink ,
My friend, Frankie, who's kind of like a really good artist-- a talented-- a young guy that both Mink and I knew.
It's my sentimental chapter, in a way, because it's really about friendship-- about Mink and I being friends for 50 years.
She's been in all my movies, and all the audience that have grown up on my movies grew up with Mink , you know, and I'm still really, really good friends with her.
because, at that laboratory, the two key species they worked with were foxes and mink because there was so much money
I remember, on the first day, she walked in with her floor-length purple mink coat and said, I own a baseball team.
That happened to me once, I really exaggerated it, but-- The most obscure line is when Mink asks David Lochary something, and he just says, "N," which means no.
one person's space and time equals some numbers times this person's space and time. And so that's kind of a staggering thing. So that is where Einstein and Minkowski really did this
And that came not from Einstein, but from his old math professor at university, Hermann Minkowski.