Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804-1851), please see a short biography at the following link
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~...ns/Jacobi.html was the first mathematician to study the intimate relation between dynamics and the geometry of curved spaces. Hence, a proper starting point for our investigation would be his principle of 1845.
In the spacelike region of the light cone, we apply Jacobi’s principle to determine the orientation of one space axis by minimizing the action integral in the configuration space.
[math]\bar{A}=\int^{\tau_2}_{\tau_1}\sqrt{2(E-V)}\bar{ds}[/math]
This expression is identical to the one given by Cornelius Lanczos in his book entitled ‘The Variational Principles of Mechanics’, 4th Edition, page 135, Dover, New York, 1986. If we restrict ourselves to the case of a single spacetime event, the line element [math]\bar{ds}[/math] becomes identical with the line element of ordinary 3D space in arbitrary curvilinear coordinates. The principle then bears a significant resemblance with Fermat’s principle of least time in optics which determines the optical path by minimizing the integral
[math]I=\int^{\tau_2}_{\tau_1} n \bar{ds} [/math]
Where n is the refractive index. A workable hypothesis is the connection between time axis and space axis and the wave-particle nature of the photon and the speed of light in vacuum.


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