"light cone" meaning in English

See light cone in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: light cones [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} light cone (plural light cones)
  1. (relativity) In special relativity, the pattern describing the temporal evolution of a flash of light in Minkowski spacetime. This is modeled in 3-space using the two horizontal axes as spatial dimensions, while the vertical axis is time. Categories (topical): Relativity Translations (Translations): Lichtkegel [masculine] (German), cone de luz [masculine] (Portuguese), con de lumină [neuter] (Romanian)
    Sense id: en-light_cone-en-noun-hqx94YJj Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 80 20 Disambiguation of 'Translations': 100 0
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see light, cone. Synonyms: lightcone
    Sense id: en-light_cone-en-noun-6pOCDI7-

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for light cone meaning in English (2.6kB)

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          "ref": "1998, Hermann Bondi, Miranda Weston-Smith, editors, The Universe Unfolding, Clarendon Press, page 384",
          "text": "This gives the future light cone of the event. Similarly, you can define the past light cone—as the history of a spherical shell of light converging in on the event. All these spatial spheres, past and future, represent cross-sections through the space–time light cone, […]",
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          "text": "This gives the future light cone of the event. Similarly, you can define the past light cone—as the history of a spherical shell of light converging in on the event. All these spatial spheres, past and future, represent cross-sections through the space–time light cone, […]",
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      "word": "Lichtkegel"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.