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20-22 March 2023 - An invitation sent to colleagues whose research interests are in the foundations and philosophy of spacetime:

Minkowski Institute is inviting colleagues who are interested in joining (as affiliated members of the Institute) its most ambitious research project - to examine rigorously whether gravitational phenomena are noting more than manifestations of the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime, which would mean that gravitation is not a physical interaction.

As is well-known in the present situation in physics it is difficult to secure funds for projects in fundamental physics that do not fall into the area of the big projects such as LHC and LIGO, for example. Although the research at the Minkowski Institute does overlap with the research at LHC and LIGO, our approach and particularly our research strategy are significantly different.

Now the research at the Minkowski Institute is on its first and major research project as outlined below and the Institute continues to invite researchers who are interested in working on this project and its implications as affiliated members. Inquiries by interested researchers are given careful consideration.

In his groundbreaking talk "Space and Time" in 1908 Hermann Minkowski announced the revolutionary view of the unification of space and time into an inseparable four-dimensional world (with time as the fourth dimension), which we now call spacetime. Almost certainly Minkowski arrived independently at what Einstein called special relativity and at the notion of spacetime (but Einstein and Poincaré published first) by successfully decoding the profound message (that the world is four-dimensional) hidden in the failed experiments to detect absolute uniform motion, that is, he revealed the deep physical meaning of the principle of relativity (postulated by Einstein and explained by Minkowski) - physical laws are the same in all inertial refererence frames (otherwise absolute motion can be discovered) because the reference frames in relative motion have different proper spaces and times and the physical laws are expressed in the same way in each frame in terms of its proper space and time; but many spaces and times imply a four-dimensional world (Minkowski remarked that it was Einstein who regarded on equal footing the different times of obsetvers in relative motion, formally introduced by Lorentz, but pointed out that neither Lorentz nor Einstein examined the notion of space, after which he explicitly stated the essence of the physical meaning of the principle of relativity: "Hereafter we would then have in the world no more the space, but an infinite number of spaces analogously as there is an infinite number of planes in three-dimensional space. Three-dimensional geometry becomes a chapter in four-dimensional physics"). Minkowski had clearly realized that four-dimensional physics was in fact spacetime geometry since all particles which appear to move in space and last in time are in reality a forever given web of the particles' worldlines in spacetime. Then Minkowski outlined his program of geometrization of physics:

The whole world presents itself as resolved into such worldlines, and I want to say in advance, that in my understanding the laws of physics can find their most complete expression as interrelations between these worldlines.

Unfortunately, this program has not been fully explored (even in general relativity) mainly due to two reasons:

1. The reality of the Minkowski four-dimensional world (spacetime) is not an accepted fact in physics since some physicists think that theories are just descriptions of physical phenomena and therefore physics cannot say which theoretical entities have counterparts in the physical world. This metatheoretical issue (whether theoretical entities adequately represent elements of the physical world) might have been hampering the advancement of fundamental physics in the last 80 years. Addressing and resolving it can be done by recalling that part of the art of doing physics is to determine whether different theories are indeed simply different descriptions of the same physical phenomena (as is the case with the three representations of classical mechanics - Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian), or only one of the theories representing given physical phenomena is the correct one (as is the case with general relativity, which identifies gravity with the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime, and other theories, which regard gravity as a force).

2. It is often stated that the notion of spacetime cannot accommodate the probabilistic behavior of quantum objects. However, the fact that quantum objects are not worldlines in spacetime only indicates what they are not, and in no way questions the reality of spacetime. Quantum objects might simply be more complex structures in spacetime than worldlines. ^[1]

Often the issue of the reality of spacetime is ignored by physicists since they regard it as belonging to philosophy. Hardly anything can be wronger than such a position with far reaching negative implications for fundamental physics. The dimensionality of the world is a purely physical question that should be answered by physics alone. Moreover, Minkowski himself forcefully stressed it that the new view of spacetime arose from the domain of experimental physics.

This research project has two main stages:

• Rigorously examining the relativistic experimental evidence to determine whether it would be at all possible if the world were not four-dimensional.
• If the reality of spacetime is confirmed, which will confirm Minkowski's discovery that four-dimensional physics is merely spacetime geometry, all possible implications for fundamental physics will be studied, particularly for quantum gravity,^[2] gravitational wave physics, and the nature of elementary particles.