The Mad Hatter's astronomy
On Tuesday, September 11, 2018 at 12:44:43 AM UTC-6, Gerald Kelleher wrote:
Like most Victorians, he assumed this term had to mean something, so in the
preface to his Lectures on Quaternions of 1853 he added a footnote: “It seemed
(and still seems) to me natural to connect this extra-spatial unit with the
conception of time.”
While that was just a wild guess at the time, Einstein's Special Theory of
Relativity has indeed made it meaningful to do this, using the speed of light as
the scale factor relating space and time.
John Savard
|