Kevin Wampler schrieb:

> In light of one of your other comments I think I now understand what 
> point you're making: we can treat space-time distances in a common set 
> of units by treating distances as times via the speed of light.  In 
> which case I'd agree, and it fact the necessity for this clearly falls 
> out of being able to have a single number represent the distance at all.

Yes...

> I still don't see how it's relevant for my initial comment that the 
> space and time coordinates are treated differently though, since they 
> are most definitely factor into the distance function in different ways. 
>  Stated another way, swapping the time axis with a space axis is *not* 
> in the symmetries of Minkowski spacetime, but swapping any of the space 
> axes *is*, and this there's something "different" about the time axis. 
> Otherwise why bother saying (3+1)D instead of just 4D?

Well, your original statememt was that "distances are measured 
differently in time than in space", not "distances are computed 
differently in spacetime than in space", so I took this as talking about 
"measuring tapes", not the math to combine space and time components of 
distance into spacetime distance.

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