Quote Originally Posted by SergeMak View Post
Interestingly, though, that some scientific ideas were primarily invented by sci-fi writers and only then became adopted by physicists. Such a thing has happened with the idea of relativistic space-time. The Einstein-Minkovsky concept is that time is just another dimension of relativistic space-time unity. But this idea was elaborated by H.G. Wells in his "The Time Machine". I used too think that Wells wrote that novel under the impression of relativistic ideas of Einstein, but in reality, the book was written a few decades before Minkovsky and Einstein developed their time-space concept. And the book was based on a short story published even several decades earlier than the novel. So it looks like Wells knew intuitively about time-space half a century before scientists did!
I don't think so. Speculations about "fourth spatial dimension" were quite common in the time of Wells (almost as now). The Idea to put time to the same coordinate system as spatial coordinates was obvious and trivial if not for Euclid then for Descartes for sure (remember those school graphs of distance vs time). What stated Wells is "look, they are similar: all are measurable. If we can change our coordinate in space maybe with some device we can arbitrarily change our time coordinate". What came from Einstein's mathematics is: "time and space positions are not independent values but mixed up in a special way". I don't see why it can be the same.