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"Space and Time" (1908)

The scientific organising committee invites papers in any research area related to the physics of spacetime, e.g., papers on areas related to Minkowski's contributions to the foundations of spacetime physics and on modern ramifications of his ideas general relativistic topics approaches to create a theory of quantum gravity any topic in cosmology

Starting from this meeting the scientific organising committee also invites talks and encourages participation in the panel discussions on two specific research directions (these directions constitute the two main research projects at Minkowski Institute):

• Whether gravitational phenomena can be fully explained by the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime without the need to assume that gravitation is a physical interaction. For example, one may wonder how Hermann Minkowski, had he been alive in 1915, might have reformulated (or arrived independently at) Einstein's general relativity by employing his program of geometrizing physics: demonstrating that gravitational phenomena can be fully accounted for by the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime without the need to assume that gravitation is a physical interaction; in 1921 Eddington mentioned this possibility explicitly - "gravitation as a separate agency becomes unnecessary" (A. S. Eddington, The Relativity of Time, Nature 106, 802-804, 17 February 1921).

• Whether spacetime physics naturally describes both macroscopic (including gravitational) phenomena and microscopic (quantum) phenomena. Now there exists a wide-spread misconception that the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics contradicts the deterministic nature of spacetime physics. The assumption that spacetime physics is deterministic is just wrong: what spacetime physics states is that the world is four-dimensional. However, such a world equally accommodates deterministic and probabilistic phenomena. This fact was first clearly realized in the eighthies by A. H. Anastassov, who considered the implications of the idea of atomism brought to its logical completing - 4-atomism (discreteness in both space and time, more precisely - discreteness in spacetime). The deterministic behaviour of a classical particle is represented by a worldline in spacetime, whereas the probabilistic behaviour of an electron, for example, can be represented by a more complex (probabilistic) spacetime structure - e.g., the electron can be represented by the "disintegrated" worldline of the classical electron, whose constituents are probabilistically scattered all over the spacetime region where the electron's wavefunction is different from zero, which means that the probabilistic distribution of the electron's constituents is "forever given" in spacetime. Had Minkowski lived longer he might have been thrilled to describe such a probabilistic spacetime structure by another mystical expression (the first one is in his paper "Space and Time") - "predetermined probabilistic phenomena." [In the ordinary three-dimensional language this probabilistic spacetime structure manifests itself as appearance and disappearance of the constituents of the electron at the Compton frequency.] It is unfortunate that so far this revolutionary idea remained unnoticed despite that it identifies and deals with a fundamental continuity at the heart of quantum mechanics - the almost explicit assumption that quantum objects exist continuously in time.

Abstracts should be emailed to minkowski2025@minkowskiinstitute.com by 1 June 2025. They will be reviewed and notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 June 2025. All presentations will be in-person only.

So far colleagues have also suggested to include the following sessions in the conference program (if we receive enough relevant abstracts):

• Conformal invariance
• Dark matter and dark energy
• Modified gravity
• Nature of spacetime singularities
• Nature of black holes
• Open questions in spacetime physics
• Relativistic mass
• Spacetime modifications in the near-horizon region: Yey or Nay?
• The Hubble tension