On the Appeal to a Pre-Established Harmony Between Pure Mathematics and Relativity Physics

Abstract

Soon after its appearance in 1905, the Einsteinian relativity with its relativistically admissible 3-velocities was recognized by Vladimir Varicak in 1908 as the realization in physics of the hyperbolic geometry of Bolyai and Lobachevski. At the same time, however, during the years 1907–1909 Minkowski reformulated the Einsteinian relativity in terms of a space of 4-velocities that now bears his name. As a result, the special theory of relativity that we find in the mainstream literature is not the one originally formulated by Einstein but, rather, the one reformulated by Minkowski. Thus, in particular, one of the most powerful ideas of Einstein in 1905, the Einstein addition of relativistically admissible 3-velocities that need not be parallel, is unheard of in most texts on relativity physics. Following our recently published book, Beyond the Einstein Addition, Law and its Gyroscopic Thomas Precession: The Theory of Gyrogroups and Gyrovector Spaces [1], the aim of this article is to employ the principle of pre-established harmony between mathematics and physics to demonstrate that the original Einsteinian relativity, as opposed to the Minkowskian relativity, is the legitimate formulation of special relativity whose time has returned.