Minkowski plane

Okay, so imagine you're looking at a piece of paper with a coordinate grid on it. Normally, if you want to measure how far apart two points are, you just use a ruler and measure the distance directly between them, right?

But what if we wanted to measure distances in a different way? Like, say, if we're moving really fast or we're in a warped space? That's where the Minkowski plane comes in.

The Minkowski plane is like a special version of that coordinate grid we were talking about earlier, where instead of measuring distance directly between points, we measure something called "interval". Interval is kind of like distance, but it can be negative or even imaginary in some cases.

Interval is measured using a special formula that takes into account both distance-like measures and time-like measures. In the Minkowski plane, time is treated like another coordinate, just like the x and y coordinates. This means that moving through time is just like moving through space, and we can measure how far apart two events (like someone jumping up and down) are in both space and time.

So, imagine you're watching a cartoon where a character is running really fast. In the Minkowski plane, we can see that the distance they travel through space (running forward) is less than the distance they travel through time (running forward in time). This means that they're actually moving through both space and time, and we can measure their overall movement using this special formula.

Overall, the Minkowski plane is a way of measuring intervals between events in a warped spacetime, where distance and time aren't as simple as we might think!