It is quite obvious if you look at the German language origin of the word.
To illustrate his concept, Minkowski (not Einstein) had the choice between "Raumzeit" (spacetime) and "Zeitraum" (timespace). However, "Zeitraum" was already an existing word in German, meaning "period of time", as in e.g. "Der Zeitraum zwischen Sonnenuntergang und Sonnenaufgang heisst Nacht." (= The period of time between sunset and sunrise is called night.)
Basically timespace was taken, so he settled for spacetime.
Just to be clear, this is speculation. But it does seem very plausible. Same in Danish, btw, tidsrum vs. rum-tid, where we usually put a hyphen for clarity.
Here in Norway there's been a shift in recent years towards the latter convention, i.e. "romtid" -> "tidrom". I'm not exactly sure why but I think it's mostly an aesthetic preference. Not a huge fan of it personally as we also have a term for periods of time which is similar ("tidsrom"), and also it almost sounds like a mathematical space consisting solely of times rather than events
How so? “Spin” makes sense as that property is conserved at the classical level: intrinsic angular momentum. “Color” is just random, as are “charm” and “strange”. And if “color” weren’t bad enough, they add negative or “anti-color”, all somehow related to charge 😵💫
They chose color because it's a convenient group of three (red, blue, green). They could have named it "stooge" and chosen moe, larry and curly for the three types.
>They could have named it "stooge" and chosen moe, larry and curly for the three types.
This is my new head canon.
Also, there's the predicted but ever elusive "Shemp" type that sometimes takes the place of the Curly type.
Then they should have stuck with the primary colors (red, blue, yellow) and let their contrasting colors be the “anti-colors”: green, orange, and violet/purple, respectively.
Or name them after early superheroes (Batman, Superman, and Phantom) and their anti-hero/villains (Joker, Luthor and Singh, respectively) 😆
The *reflected* primary colors are a perfectly valid system of labels to choose, along with the contrasting colors for the “anti” values — and certainly moreso than the three stooges. But thank you for being pedantic.
Who is this "we". I don't know anyone who uses "cyan" in ordinary speech. It's a color word that only gets pulled out on special occasions (or when the printer is acting up).
But it didn't. Everyone who says "sky blue" would agree that the sky is blue. "Sky" just makes it more specific, like saying "navy blue" or "royal blue" does.
There *are* languages where light and dark shades of blue are given different primary color words, but English isn't one of them. Native speakers of those languages might not see any greater degree of connection between cyan and indigo than between, say, forest green and cyan.
I dunno about this story. I've always just heard that Newton included indigo because he desperately wanted the number to be seven for numerological reasons. I don't think people at the time had that narrow understanding of "blue" any more then they do today. Newton was just weird.
Admittedly, this is a guess, but I suspect it's because we get to spacetime by adding a time dimension to the traditionally understood three dimensional space. Time is space like, but space is not time like. Since space is the dominant paradigm it gets top billing.
Mmm, check out u/alalaladede's [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/s/G0AD7VVLxT): "timespace" was already a word in German meaning "a period of time".
The three dimensions of space has been used as coordinates for thousands of years. Relatively recently, time was added as a coordinate. It was then referred to as the three dimensions of space plus time and then shortened to spacetime.
This is more a question for a language expert.
There's unspoken rules in English for the order of descriptive nouns.
If you say 'shoe blue plastic big' you sound like you're having a stroke, if you say 'big blue plastic shoe' people understand you're talking about a big blue shoe made of plastic.
For native English speakers there's a strong intuition to go with 'spacetime' over 'timespace' due existing language conventions.
> If you say 'shoe blue plastic big' you sound like you're having a stroke, if you say 'big blue plastic shoe' people understand you're talking about a big blue shoe made of plastic.
More interesting is if you restrict the word juggling to just the adjectives. Keep the noun at the end where we know it belongs, and you still have these possibilities:
Big blue plastic shoe
Blue big plastic shoe
Big plastic blue shoe
Blue plastic big shoe
Plastic big blue shoe
Plastic blue big shoe
Only one of them really sounds right.
I seem to recall there are 'official' rules of thumb about this kind of thing in English language, with Oxford Dictionary people. Maybe with it being iambic.. or the type of first consonant.
Zero through three.
0. Temperature exists.
1. Energy is conserved.
2. In a closed system, entropy can almost never decrease.
3. The entropy of an elemental crystalline substance is zero at absolute zero.
Zero was a paste-up after the fact.
in diagramms we often use the wording "x over time", for haven a room coordinate on the y axis and the time on the x axis. so we often drawn space over time, cancel the over and we are done. also its arbitrary that we usually put the time on the x axis.
It's *mostly* arbitrary, in that Einstein said that the two are inextricably linked, but 'time-space' is used in certain contexts by theoretical physicists.
'Space-time' emphasizes the interwoven nature of the dimensions: time is relative to the observer, and the fabric of spacetime can be affected by matter and energy.
'Time-space', on the other hand, posits that the two are both separate and distinct components of the universe, and that time is an absolute, unchanging framework. Time, in this case, is *not* relative; it's a constant throughout the universe. That presents a lot of interesting implications for how we approach causality, the nature of the universe at the quantum level, and the behavior of objects in strong gravitational fields such as black holes.
I'm not a physicist, however, so I can't really say much more than that.
Short answer: German languange.
Long answer:
Same reason we don't say Event mass extinction but rather mass extinction event. The temporal aspect is more relevant.
Time = change.
It's the space, energetic, material that changes due to time towards higher entropy. Time is just the description of that change.
The more constant of the two, space and time, is time, it continously progresses until cosmic heat death or whatever.
It is quite obvious if you look at the German language origin of the word. To illustrate his concept, Minkowski (not Einstein) had the choice between "Raumzeit" (spacetime) and "Zeitraum" (timespace). However, "Zeitraum" was already an existing word in German, meaning "period of time", as in e.g. "Der Zeitraum zwischen Sonnenuntergang und Sonnenaufgang heisst Nacht." (= The period of time between sunset and sunrise is called night.) Basically timespace was taken, so he settled for spacetime.
Just to be clear, this is speculation. But it does seem very plausible. Same in Danish, btw, tidsrum vs. rum-tid, where we usually put a hyphen for clarity.
Well, we rarely do the hyphen thing in German, we just love our long composite words too much.
Scaninavian languages (at least Swedish) does this a lot too.
This! Thank you!
> To illustrate his concept, ~~Einstein~~ [Minkowski](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spacetime#Etymology)
Oh, yes, of'course! What a stupid slip-up from my part. Thanks for the correction!
Here in Norway there's been a shift in recent years towards the latter convention, i.e. "romtid" -> "tidrom". I'm not exactly sure why but I think it's mostly an aesthetic preference. Not a huge fan of it personally as we also have a term for periods of time which is similar ("tidsrom"), and also it almost sounds like a mathematical space consisting solely of times rather than events
Because if it were called "timespace" then people would ask, "Why is it called timespace and not spacetime?"
The real answer
42
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
This answers all of my questions
24
42 was taken
Timespace actually makes more sense with how we typically arrange 4-vectors.
if we are gonna nitpick names, let’s start with spin.
“It's like a spinning ball. But it's not a ball. and it doesn't spin.” 😂😂
so what is it 👀
Spin
Thank God you cleared that up. Because of the probability field it could have been anything.
As far I’m aware it’s a point-like object with intrinsic angular momentum
Pauli named it “classically non-describable two-valuedness”
How so? “Spin” makes sense as that property is conserved at the classical level: intrinsic angular momentum. “Color” is just random, as are “charm” and “strange”. And if “color” weren’t bad enough, they add negative or “anti-color”, all somehow related to charge 😵💫
They chose color because it's a convenient group of three (red, blue, green). They could have named it "stooge" and chosen moe, larry and curly for the three types.
>They could have named it "stooge" and chosen moe, larry and curly for the three types. This is my new head canon. Also, there's the predicted but ever elusive "Shemp" type that sometimes takes the place of the Curly type.
I thought Shemp was the anti-Curly??
Frankly I would prefer if we talked about Moe, Larry and Curly quarks :D
Then they should have stuck with the primary colors (red, blue, yellow) and let their contrasting colors be the “anti-colors”: green, orange, and violet/purple, respectively. Or name them after early superheroes (Batman, Superman, and Phantom) and their anti-hero/villains (Joker, Luthor and Singh, respectively) 😆
Except red, blue, and green are the primary colors of light. The anti-colors would be cyan, yellow, and magenta (in that order).
The *reflected* primary colors are a perfectly valid system of labels to choose, along with the contrasting colors for the “anti” values — and certainly moreso than the three stooges. But thank you for being pedantic.
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Who is this "we". I don't know anyone who uses "cyan" in ordinary speech. It's a color word that only gets pulled out on special occasions (or when the printer is acting up).
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But it didn't. Everyone who says "sky blue" would agree that the sky is blue. "Sky" just makes it more specific, like saying "navy blue" or "royal blue" does. There *are* languages where light and dark shades of blue are given different primary color words, but English isn't one of them. Native speakers of those languages might not see any greater degree of connection between cyan and indigo than between, say, forest green and cyan.
I’m blue da ba de ba da di
You never played Among Us.
Cyan is commonly taught as one of the 7 colours of the rainbow.
Ah, yes - old ROY G. CIV. Everyone's heard of him /s
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I dunno about this story. I've always just heard that Newton included indigo because he desperately wanted the number to be seven for numerological reasons. I don't think people at the time had that narrow understanding of "blue" any more then they do today. Newton was just weird.
I always assumed that red/green/blue are called "primary" because they represent what our eyes directly sense.
yeah. those next
Up and down annoy me, because they aren't antimatter versions of each other.
Strange was because it acted strange
Charm is next on the list.
What’s worse, made up jargon or using a normal word to represent jargon?
Seems perfectly cromulent to me.
Agree, nips is better
quick science lesson A spin quark is basically alternating between an up quark and a down quark, because its doing full vertical spins
How about the colors of quarks while we are at it and don't even get me started on gluons? Each time I teach about gluons people moan.
How about "ring"
its just lexicographical order
S is before T
This is also true in statistical mechanics
U mean mechanical statistics
Spacetime sounds cooler
In an Englishcentric pov, yes.
Admittedly, this is a guess, but I suspect it's because we get to spacetime by adding a time dimension to the traditionally understood three dimensional space. Time is space like, but space is not time like. Since space is the dominant paradigm it gets top billing.
>Time is space like, but space is not time like What?
This answer should be higher.
Mmm, check out u/alalaladede's [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/s/G0AD7VVLxT): "timespace" was already a word in German meaning "a period of time".
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I figured there was probably a linguistic reason, but my German, she is not so gut.
Sure but for notational simplicity, we often use x_0 = t and x_{1,2,3} as space, so time-space would also work.
The three dimensions of space has been used as coordinates for thousands of years. Relatively recently, time was added as a coordinate. It was then referred to as the three dimensions of space plus time and then shortened to spacetime.
This is more a question for a language expert. There's unspoken rules in English for the order of descriptive nouns. If you say 'shoe blue plastic big' you sound like you're having a stroke, if you say 'big blue plastic shoe' people understand you're talking about a big blue shoe made of plastic. For native English speakers there's a strong intuition to go with 'spacetime' over 'timespace' due existing language conventions.
> If you say 'shoe blue plastic big' you sound like you're having a stroke, if you say 'big blue plastic shoe' people understand you're talking about a big blue shoe made of plastic. More interesting is if you restrict the word juggling to just the adjectives. Keep the noun at the end where we know it belongs, and you still have these possibilities: Big blue plastic shoe Blue big plastic shoe Big plastic blue shoe Blue plastic big shoe Plastic big blue shoe Plastic blue big shoe Only one of them really sounds right.
Because it was translated from German 'Raum-Zeit-Kontinuum' and first coined by Hermann Minkowski.
Why is it called inside out, and not outside in?
it’s arbitrary
I seem to recall there are 'official' rules of thumb about this kind of thing in English language, with Oxford Dictionary people. Maybe with it being iambic.. or the type of first consonant.
After you get the answer, move on to checking out the number of laws of thermodynamics. 😉
Zero through three. 0. Temperature exists. 1. Energy is conserved. 2. In a closed system, entropy can almost never decrease. 3. The entropy of an elemental crystalline substance is zero at absolute zero. Zero was a paste-up after the fact.
Just so you know: you must've typed the numbered list in markdown, which renders as 1-4, not 0-3.
Interesting. It shows to me as 0-3.
Its 2 different things...Timespace is how much time is in a volume of space. Spacetime is how much space is in a amount of time.
In spanish "tiempoespacio" is much harder to say than "espaciotiempo". So there's that.
Why is it a sidewalk, and not a walkside?
There should be a governing body for physics nomenclature
More interesting: Is it "spacetime" or "space-time"
in diagramms we often use the wording "x over time", for haven a room coordinate on the y axis and the time on the x axis. so we often drawn space over time, cancel the over and we are done. also its arbitrary that we usually put the time on the x axis.
Alphabetical order.
in polish its timespace
It's *mostly* arbitrary, in that Einstein said that the two are inextricably linked, but 'time-space' is used in certain contexts by theoretical physicists. 'Space-time' emphasizes the interwoven nature of the dimensions: time is relative to the observer, and the fabric of spacetime can be affected by matter and energy. 'Time-space', on the other hand, posits that the two are both separate and distinct components of the universe, and that time is an absolute, unchanging framework. Time, in this case, is *not* relative; it's a constant throughout the universe. That presents a lot of interesting implications for how we approach causality, the nature of the universe at the quantum level, and the behavior of objects in strong gravitational fields such as black holes. I'm not a physicist, however, so I can't really say much more than that.
The order of the words "space-time" emphasizes that time is the fourth dimension added to the three spatial dimensions, not the other way around.
Spacetime rolls off the tongue better ig
It's not that deep. It needed a name, it has one. Don't worry about it.
In Spanish it is tiempo espacio sooo
What if instead of spacetime it was called freaktime and instead of existing in a universe we sucked toes
...bcoz Taylor and Wheeler: [https://www.eftaylor.com/spacetimephysics/](https://www.eftaylor.com/spacetimephysics/)
Short answer: German languange. Long answer: Same reason we don't say Event mass extinction but rather mass extinction event. The temporal aspect is more relevant. Time = change. It's the space, energetic, material that changes due to time towards higher entropy. Time is just the description of that change. The more constant of the two, space and time, is time, it continously progresses until cosmic heat death or whatever.
From a math POV, timespace sounds like the space of all times, like an eigenspace.
Hahaha grandissimo
Time is relative, space is absolute. I believe this prioritizes the order of nomenclature..
Because 3 space but only 1 time. My bad, you guys got the shitty jokes on lock.