SOMMERFELD, ARNOLD.

Zur Relativitätstheorie. I. Vierdimensionale Vektoralgebra.

Leipzig, Ambrosius Barth, 1910. 8vo. In full black cloth with gilt lettering to spine. In "Annalen der Physik", Vierte Folge, Band 32. Entire volume offered. Library labels to front end papers and stamp to title page, otherwise fine and clean. Pp. 749-76. [Entire volume: VIII, 1112 pp. + 15 plates.].

First appearance of Sommerfeld's important response to Minkowski famous 1908 lecture in which he argued famously in Cologne that certain circumstances required scientists to discard the view of physical space as a Euclidean three-space, in favor of a four-dimensional world with a geometry characterized by the invariance of a certain quadratic form.

"Sommerfeld insisted upon the simpli?cation a?orded to calculation by the adoption of a spacetime approach, and left aside Minkowski's philosophical interpretation of spacetime, with one exception. In the introduction to his 1910 reformulation of Minkowski's matrix calculus, Sommerfeld echoed Minkowski's belief that absolute space should vanish from physics, to be replaced by the "absolute world" of Minkowski spacetime [10, p. 749]. This exchange of absolutes, Euclidean 3-space for Minkowski spacetime, was clearly designed to calm physicists shocked by Minkowski's high-handed dismissal of Euclidean space as the frame adequate for understanding physical phenomena." (Walter, Hermann Minkowski and the Scandal of Spacetime)

Order-nr.: 50371