Intervals are the square of the distance, so not quite, but… yes. There’s a tendency to treat spacetime intervals as something abstract and possibly metaphysic

Intervals are the square of the distance, so not quite, but… yes. There’s a tendency to treat spacetime intervals as something abstract and possibly metaphysical, because we can’t see or touch them, and they work counterintuitively. They’re actually the opposite. Our normal experience of 3D space is what is unphysical; the (square root of the) spacetime interval is simply distance, measured in meters. Or seconds, of course. The literal, physical distance between an absorption and emission event is always zero. Reality is non-Euclidean. The Manhattan distance is larger than the actual distance, which is usually true anyway. Well, I suspect I just spent a lot of words telling you something you already knew, so I’ll leave off with a book recommendation. Dichronauts, by Greg Egan. Between that and the Clockwork Rocket trilogy, I don’t know a better way to inculcate an intuition for special relativity. One is set in a 2+2 spacetime; the other in 4+0. The differences are instructive.