History of the Lorentz Transformation
- From: maxwell <spsi@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 11:23:16 -0700
Members of the EM Group may again be interested in the following post
as it
too was recently rejected by the Moderator of the Physics.Research
group:
in a thread entitled 'Relativity without Tears'. This time my post
was rejected
without the courtesy of an explanation; perhaps he objected to me re-
posting
the previously rejected one in a more open forum, such as EM. This
would
seem to confirm the suspicion the 'Referees' are more interested in
preserving
the orthodox view than they are in eliminating rudeness, plagiarism or
duplication.
Again, in this case, I thought I was contributing some further
historical insight
based on my extensive studies into Maxwell's EM theories & the history
of relativity.
In this particular post, I was correcting a commonly viewed erroneous
belief of how the
equations known as the 'Lorentz Transformation' arose prior to
Einstein's 1905 paper.
Maxwell was the original Master Magician; firstly in 1865, in the
On Sep 20, 2007 @ 4:42 pm, ar...@xxxxxxxxx (Murray Arnow) wrote:
... It also dawned on Einstein that simultaneous events aren't simultaneous
to all observers: time was not as Newton believed it to be. That's when
things really made sense. The constancy of the speed of light was an
outgrowth of that. I believe that was the historical sequence.
The constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum is built into Maxwell's
Equations. That was known well known at the time; Einstein alludes to that
in his 1905 paper. The need for an aether was laid to rest by his
paper. There was a great deal of experimental evidence before the paper
that could not verify an aether: Einstein had been shown them by his
professor Heinrich Weber. Poincare's shortcoming was that he could never
dismiss the aether as an unnecessary construct (Lorentz also believed in
the aether). Einstein had no such problem. ...
center of the stage, he described his Table (the aether) upon which he
erected his House of Cards (his Equations). Then 40 years later, his
'apprentice' (A. Einstein) made the Table disappear & voila - the
cards remained standing in the air, without any obvious support; a
position they still maintain today, at the centre of the stage, in
that great theatre known as 'Theoretical Physics'!
Murray Arnow is historically correct to point out that Poincare and
Lorentz could not imagine a field theory of EM without an aether (nor
could any other contemporary supporter of EM field theories, in
contrast to today's orthodoxy) but he is totally incorrect in his view
of the historical evolution of special relativity. This is described
in great detail by the eminent historian of science, Arthur I. Miller
in his superb text "Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity -
Emergence & Early Interpretation" (1998). Prof Miller describes (with
full historical references) in pages 23 - 80, how H. A. Lorentz in
1892 began by assuming a set of EM equations that resembled Maxwell's
(& were identical in free space) & then evolved a set of mathematical
transformations that preserved the form of these equations (later
called covariance). Invoking TEN explicit new hypotheses, Lorentz
first chose a set of Galilean transforms from the stationary aether to
the average inertial frame of the (target) moving electric "ions", he
then transformed these new equations to an imaginary reference frame,
which he viewed as purely mathematical. These transforms were
incorrect, so in 1904 Poincare threw away the intermediate, real
reference frame, simply modified the final transforms & claimed that
the final imaginary frame was an inertial reference frame. He then
'inverted' these equations & viewed the eternally stationary aether as
moving relative to the fixed sources (Lab frame). In Lorentz's honor,
Poincare named the results the 'Lorentz Transforms of Space & Time':
a magical derivation worthy of Maxwell's deepest, mathematical
admiration!
Even if Maxwell's Equations are considered valid, it is an additional
metaphysical leap of faith that these equations describe an
independent, physical ENTITY (called 'light') that moves from one
point in space to another in finite time. It is this key, unspoken
assumption that forces defenders of special relativity to modify the
foundations of space & time to produce the bizarre interpretations of
reality, mathematical physicists have adopted in the last 100 years
(many of us still don't believe that "things then made sense";
Newton's views of space & time are much more intuitive, as Kant
described).
It is far more objective to view Maxwell's EM Equations as requiring a
constant (c) that scales time into space dimensionally, on a universal
basis (L = c T), independent of the relative motion (including
acceleration) of the real electrons that constitute EM phenomena.
Ontological assumptions about the 'Nature of Light' can then be added,
according to taste.
.
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