History of Special Relativity - Introduction

Introduction

Although Isaac Newton based his theory on absolute time and space, he also adhered to the principle of relativity of Galileo Galilei. This stated that all observers who move uniformly relative to each other are equal and no absolute state of motion can be attributed to any observer. During the 19th century the aether theory was widely accepted, mostly in the form given by James Clerk Maxwell. According to Maxwell all optical and electrical phenomena propagate in a medium. Thus it seemed possible to determine absolute motion relative to the aether and therefore to disprove Galileo's principle.

The failure of any experiment to detect motion through the aether led Hendrik Lorentz in 1892 to develop a theory based on an immobile aether and the Lorentz transformation. Based on Lorentz's aether, Henri Poincaré in 1905 proposed the relativity principle as a general law of nature, including electrodynamics and gravitation. In the same year, Albert Einstein published what is now called special relativity – he radically reinterpreted Lorentzian electrodynamics by changing the concepts of space and time and abolishing the aether. This paved the way to general relativity. Subsequent work of Hermann Minkowski laid the foundations of relativistic field theories.

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