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. ~Hermann Minkowski Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore. ~Albert Einstein In my previous discussions of how we know the speed of light is constant and how this results in special relativity, I used Albert Einstein’s thought experiments to derive the time-dilating, length-contracting results. There’s another way to describe special relativity, though, invented by the Polish mathematician Hermann Minkowski. It