Minkowski dies

George Minkowski is the communications officer on the freighter.

Hermann Minkowski was a German, Polish, Jew mathematician who, for our purposes, used geometry to solve difficult problems in the theory of relativity. In 1907 he realized that the special theory of relativity could be best understood in a four dimensional space, in which the time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four dimensional space-time.

The beginning of his address delivered at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians (September 21, 1908):
The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.