Who discovered special relativity?
4022767#35
In several papers, Elie Zahar (1983, 2000) argued that both Einstein (in his June paper) and Poincaré (in his July paper) independently discovered special relativity. He said that ""though Whittaker was unjust towards Einstein, his positive account of Poincaré's actual achievement contains much more than a simple grain of truth"". According to him, it was Poincaré's unsystematic and sometimes erroneous statements regarding his philosophical papers (often connected with conventionalism), which hindered many to give him due credit. In his opinion, Poincaré was rather a "structural realist" and from that he concludes, that Poincaré actually adhered to the relativity of time and space, while his allusions to the aether are of secondary importance. He continues, that due to his treatment of gravitation and four-dimensional space, Poincaré's 1905/6-paper was superior to Einstein's 1905-paper. Yet Zahar gives also credit to Einstein, who introduced Mass–Energy equivalence, and also transcended special relativity by taking a path leading to the development of general relativity.
Relativity priority dispute
11867#78
Notable German physicists before the 20th century include Hermann von Helmholtz, Joseph von Fraunhofer and Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, among others. Albert Einstein introduced the special relativity and general relativity theories for light and gravity in 1905 and 1915 respectively. Along with Max Planck, he was instrumental in the introduction of quantum mechanics, in which Werner Heisenberg and Max Born later made major contributions. Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays. Otto Hahn was a pioneer in the fields of radiochemistry and discovered nuclear fission, while Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch were founders of microbiology. Numerous mathematicians were born in Germany, including Carl Friedrich Gauss, David Hilbert, Bernhard Riemann, Gottfried Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, Hermann Weyl, Felix Klein and Emmy Noether.
Germany
198507#26
In 1905, Albert Einstein published the principle of special relativity, which soon became a theory. Special relativity predicted the alignment of the Newtonian principle of Galilean invariance, also termed "Galilean relativity", with the electromagnetic field. By omitting from special relativity the luminiferous aether, Einstein stated that time dilation and length contraction measured in an object in relative motion is inertial—that is, the object exhibits constant velocity, which is speed with direction, when measured by its observer. He thereby duplicated the Lorentz transformation and the Lorentz contraction that had been hypothesized to resolve experimental riddles and inserted into electrodynamic theory as dynamical consequences of the aether's properties. An elegant theory, special relativity yielded its own consequences, such as the equivalence of mass and energy transforming into one another and the resolution of the paradox that an excitation of the electromagnetic field could be viewed in one reference frame as electricity, but in another as magnetism.
Scientific theory
30694430#40
Some contemporary historians of science have revived the question as to whether Einstein was possibly influenced by the ideas of Poincaré, who first stated the relativity principle and applied it to electrodynamics, developing interpretations and modifications of Lorentz's electron theory that appear to have anticipated what is now called special relativity. Another discussion concerns a possible mutual influence between Einstein and David Hilbert as regards completing the field equations of general relativity (see Relativity priority dispute).
Criticism of the theory of relativity
20069953#11
Minkowski space (or Minkowski spacetime) is a mathematical setting in which special relativity is conveniently formulated. Minkowski space is named for the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who around 1907 realized that the theory of special relativity (previously developed by Poincaré and Einstein) could be elegantly described using a four-dimensional spacetime, which combines the dimension of time with the three dimensions of space.
Special relativity (alternative formulations)
30694430#7
It was also claimed that special relativity cannot handle acceleration, which would lead to contradictions in some situations. However, this assessment is not correct, since acceleration actually can be described in the framework of special relativity (see Acceleration (special relativity), Proper reference frame (flat spacetime), Hyperbolic motion, Rindler coordinates, Born coordinates). Paradoxes relying on insufficient understanding of these facts were discovered in the early years of relativity. For example, Max Born (1909) tried to combine the concept of rigid bodies with special relativity. That this model was insufficient was shown by Paul Ehrenfest (1909), who demonstrated that a rotating rigid body would, according to Born's definition, undergo a contraction of the circumference without contraction of the radius, which is impossible (Ehrenfest paradox). Max von Laue (1911) showed that rigid bodies cannot exist in special relativity, since the propagation of signals cannot exceed the speed of light, so an accelerating and rotating body will undergo deformations.
Criticism of the theory of relativity
18918910#2
Ignatowski wrote some papers on special relativity. In 1910 he was to first who tried to derive the Lorentz transformation by group theory only using the relativity principle, and without the postulate of the constancy of the speed of light (1910b, 1911b, 1911c, 1911h). Although he derived the correct transformation, the invariant limiting speed remained undefined. Ignatowski had to resort to length contraction of moving electrostatic fields in order to identify this limiting velocity with the velocity of light in vacuum. While some said that this approach was insufficient and the second postulate is still needed, others continued the attempts to derive special relativity without the light postulate (see Postulates of special relativity). Ignatowski also investigated the status of rigid bodies within special relativity (1910a, 1911a). He concluded that velocities greater than the speed of light are possible, even though he showed that those are not signal velocities and therefore are not in conflict with relativity (1910b, 1911g). He also formulated a relativistic theory of hydrodynamics (1911f).
Vladimir Ignatowski
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Planck, in 1909, compared the implications of the modern relativity principle — he particularly referred to the relativity of time – with the revolution by the Copernican system. An important factor in the adoption of special relativity by physicists was its development by Minkowski into a spacetime theory. Consequently, by about 1911, most theoretical physicists accepted special relativity. In 1912 Wilhelm Wien recommended both Lorentz (for the mathematical framework) and Einstein (for reducing it to a simple principle) for the Nobel Prize in Physics – although it was decided by the Nobel committee not to award the prize for special relativity. Only a minority of theoretical physicists such as Abraham, Lorentz, Poincaré, or Langevin still believed in the existence of an aether. Einstein later (1918–1920) qualified his position by arguing that one can speak about a relativistic aether, but the "idea of motion" cannot be applied to it. Lorentz and Poincaré had always argued that motion through the aether was undetectable. Einstein used the expression "special theory of relativity" in 1915, to distinguish it from general relativity.
History of special relativity
20468824#2
First proposed by Luigi Fantappiè in 1954, the theory remained obscure until it was rediscovered in 1968 by Henri Bacry and Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond. In 1972, Freeman Dyson popularized it as a hypothetical road by which mathematicians could have guessed part of the structure of general relativity before it was discovered. The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe has led to a revival of interest in de Sitter invariant theories, in conjunction with other speculative proposals for new physics, like doubly special relativity.
De Sitter invariant special relativity
179947#1
First attempts to modify special relativity by introducing an observer-independent length were made by Pavlopoulos (1967), who estimated this length at about .
In the context of quantum gravity, Giovanni Amelino-Camelia (2000) introduced what now is called doubly special relativity, by proposing a specific realization of preserving invariance of the Planck length .
This was reformulated by Kowalski-Glikman (2001) in terms of an observer-independent Planck mass.
A different model, inspired by that of Amelino-Camelia, was proposed in 2001 by João Magueijo and Lee Smolin, who also focused on the invariance of Planck energy.
Doubly special relativity