Following our journey through Numiscollects latest releases over the last week, we head 850 km south-east across Europe to the small nation of Liechtenstein where one of the worlds most innovative coin producers has their home just south of the capital, Vaduz. Coin Invest Trust, known to collectors by their acronym CIT, are responsible for two of the most highly regarded series of coins on the market today, Tiffany Art and Mongolian Wildlife Protection. There also known to be one of the coin worlds great experimenters, trying out weird, unusual designs and formats, not just to be issued by themselves, but also for others, like the recent Kiwi Silhouette coin for the NZ Post. As you’d expect, they don’t always succeed, but that’s what experimenting is all about and when they do, they do so brilliantly. They usually save all their best releases for the Berlin World Money Fair in late January, with a comparitively subdued release for the Chicago ANA show, but for 2015 the Chicago releases contained a particularly fine set of new issues, exemplified by the magnificent Ammonite coin we covered late last week.

Our first delve into the new releases is a particularly ambitious design and must surely push the boundaries of just what is possible with a mechanical strike. Designed around a mathematical representation of spacetime, the concept that takes the old standard three dimensions of space and the seperate fourth dimension of time, and combines them into a single manifold called Minkowski space. The sheer three-dimensionality of the coin is extremely impressive and the way the pattern of lines has been struck into the coin while maintaining shape is of particular note. Seen from the side, it’s clear this is a very unique numismatic. The addition of a small magnetic ball representing a cosmic body, maybe the Earth, is a great touch and further lifts this release from the ordinary.

Presented in a custom tin with an enclosed certificate of authenticity, this square ½ oz fine silver coin has all the makings of a hit, especially with the mintage limited to just 1500 pieces. A fine release in our view.

MINTS DESCRIPTION

The term space-time was created by the mathematician Hermann Minkowski who, in 1908, mathematically proved that space and time cannot be separated from one another. Interestingly, he was the teacher of a certain Albert Einstein at the Polytechnic Institute in Zürich.

When in 1905, Minkowski heard about the development of the special theory of relativity by his former student, he apparently said: „I would not really have expected that from Einstein“. However, it was Einstein who set the biggest milestone in the research of space-time curvature so far in 1915, with his general theory of relativity.

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