Minkowski teacher to einsteins stud2nt : lazy dog

Russian by birth, had left the ETH in Zurich to take up a more attractive professorship in Gottingen, Germany. (Science was as international then as it is now.) In Gottingen, Minkowski studied Einstein's article on special relativity, and was impressed. That study led him to his 1908 discovery of the absolute nature of four-dimensional spacetime. When Einstein learned of Minkowski's di~;cove:ry, he was not impressed. Minkowski was merely rewriting the laws of special relativity in a new, more mathematical language; and, to Einstein, the mathematics obscured the physical ideas that underlie the laws. As Minkowski continued to extol the beauties of his spacetime viewpoint, Einstein began to make jokes about Gottingen mathematicians describing relativity in such complicated language that physicists wouldn't be able to understand it. The joke, in