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Author: Minkowski, Hermann
Title: Raum und Zeit. Vortrag, Gehalten auf der 80. Natur-Forscher-Versammlung zu Köln am 21. September 1908.
Place Published: Leipzig and Berlin
Publisher:Druck und Verlag von B. G. Teubner
Date Published: 1909
Description:
14 + [2] ad pp. With photographic portrait frontispiece, some text figures. (8vo) modern quarter green morocco and marbled boards, gilt spine, new endpapers. First Edition.

First separate edition, first printing, of Minkowski's revolutionary paper which "introduced the notion that made possible the expansion of the relativity theory of Einstein from its specific (1905) to its general form (1916). The technical description of Minkowki's hypothesis is the four-dimensional space-time continuum." (PMM). The lecture was read by Minkowski in Cologne on 21 September 1908, and its bold opening is now infamous: "The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." He died suddenly of appendicitis in January 1909, and the text of Raum und Zeit was first printed in the 1909 Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung (vol. 18, pp. 75-88), but reprinted in tribute in this desirable first separate form. Printing and the Mind of Man 401 (this separate edition acknowledged).

Light foxing to frontispiece and title page, library stamps to title page, pages trimmed; very good.