Even that article doesn't mention Minkowski. Journalists and writers have such huge egos that can never see past the man in Einstein no matter how hard he tried to explain he was also standing on the shoulders of giants.
Do you think that Minkowski was important in the development of GR? Why, specifically? (I mean in its creation, not in the evolution of its interpretation after 1915.)
EDIT: I don’t understand the relationship between the egos of writers and their estimation of Einstein’s role. “Shoulders of giants:” in fact, it was Einstein who jealously guarded his credit for GR and never seemed to mention, in public, the contributions of others, although he did in his private letters.
> Do you think that Minkowski was important in the development of GR? Why, specifically?
Minkowski came up with the concept of spacetime as a 4-dimensional geometric object. That was a crucial insight required for the development of GR: just take this geometric object, which was flat in SR, and allow it to be curved.
IIRC Einstein himself, who initially was dismissive of Minkowski's idea, later changed his mind and recognized its importance, and said so in a number of his writings about relativity. Unfortunately, Minkowski died the year after he came up with his idea, so he never got to see where it led.
Doesn't Minkowski's work with hyperbolic space predate GR? I thought it was like a stepping stone between Special and General Relativity. I don't understand GR, I'm not even close and I tried for years twice or thrice to teach myself GR and I find it pretty impenetrable. Maybe I see Minkowski's work as a stepping stone because that's one of the paths that I was put into to understand it.
In my article I talk about the people that Einstein collaborated with in his struggle to arrive at the field equations. Minkowski was not one of those people (although he was one of Einstein’s math teachers in school).
I don’t think this work of Minkowski’s that you mention is directly relevant, but, even if it’s part of the mathematical background, Minkowski is not part of that particular story. Now we talk about "four dimensional" spacetime, and that point of view is largely due to Minkowski. But it wasn’t Einstein’s point of view, and for years Einstein remarked that he didn’t see the point—it seemed needlessly formal and academic to him. But he sort of came around later.
> I don’t think this work of Minkowski’s that you mention is directly relevant, but, even if it’s part of the mathematical background, Minkowski is not part of that particular story.
Probably you are right, but... maybe its just me, but this coincidence seems too much of a coincidence. I can't resist hypothesizing, would it be possible to Minkowski somehow influence Einstein, maybe indirectly. For example, Minkowski was interested in curved spaces, it is possible that he somehow implanted his ideas into Einstein's mind, isn't it? Not consciously, but as it happens with teachers passionate with their subject by bringing his favorite topic in his lectures for any reason or even without any reason.
> But it wasn’t Einstein’s point of view, and for years Einstein remarked that he didn’t see the point—it seemed needlessly formal and academic to him. But he sort of came around later.
This fact also can be incorporated into my hypothesis, though with an additional assumption: teenager Einstein was exhausted by his teacher's constant remarks about curved spaces, and was conditioned to roll his eyes hearing about curved spaces. So he naturally continued to roll his eyes at curved space-time.
Yeah, it is just a hypothesis, a wild guess, and even if it was true, it wouldn't mean that Minkowski was a collaborator, but what a fun story it may be. A story about a passionate teacher shaping a mind of genius into a curved space despite all lack of mutual enthusiasm.
On a more serious note, I can remark, that this hypothesis consistent with all I know about a human mind. Einstein might have a mental model for a curved space, and his mind might have used this model to propose new thought experiments, but Einstein disliked the very idea to the point of not noticing how his mind relies on it, and he worked hard consciously to find another model to rely on. Moreover there are psychological theories stating that a mind must have at least two different models/representations of a problem domain to deal with it successfully, so this hypothetical inner conflict might benefited Einstein's genius by urging him to construct his second mental representation of gravity.
