Adding Minkowski options in my Voronoi page made me realize that I really wasn’t sure how to interpret the results, and that I’d always been puzzled thinking about the zero distance between points of the light cone means.
Reading: Where Is Now? The Paradox Of the Present made a few things snap into place for me. We are small slow moving creatures and the natural speed of space-time is way too fast for us to grasp. It’s only when we look at things that are far, far away like the night sky that we have to come to grips with being denizens of a Minkowski space.
I’ve often thought that one of the biggest hurdles with trying to understand relativity is that most introductions tackle multiple mathematical abstractions all at the same time. Space-time is a complicated concept that is still useful in non-relativistic mechanics. Thinking about points in time is a skill which takes time to learn. Thinking about 4 dimensional and higher spaces is another skill that can be tackled on it’s own. There are many useful and interesting abstract non-Euclidean geometries that don’t require quite the same leap of understanding as relativity.
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