Joseph Larmor - Biography

Biography

He grew up in Belfast, the son of a shopkeeper. He was a student at Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Queen's University Belfast, and St John's College, Cambridge where he was Senior Wrangler. After teaching physics for a few years at Queen's College, Galway, he accepted a lectureship in mathematics at Cambridge in 1885. In 1903 he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post he retained until his retirement in 1932. He never married.

Larmor proposed that the aether could be represented as a homogeneous fluid medium which was perfectly incompressible and elastic. Larmor believed the aether was separate from matter. He united Lord Kelvin's model of spinning gyrostats (e.g., vortices) with this theory.

Parallel to the development of Lorentz ether theory, Larmor published the Lorentz transformations in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1897 some two years before Hendrik Lorentz (1899, 1904) and eight years before Albert Einstein (1905). Larmor however did not possess the correct velocity transformations, which include the addition of velocities law, which were later discovered by Henri Poincaré. Larmor predicted the phenomenon of time dilation, at least for orbiting electrons, and verified that the FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction (length contraction) should occur for bodies whose atoms were held together by electromagnetic forces. In his book Aether and Matter (1900), he again presented the Lorentz transformations, time dilation and length contraction (treating these as dynamic rather than kinematic effects). Larmor opposed Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (though he supported it for a short time). Larmor rejected both the curvature of space and the special theory of relativity, to the extent that he claimed that an absolute time was essential to astronomy (Larmor 1924, 1927).

Larmor held that matter consisted of particles moving in the aether. Larmor believed the source of electric charge was a "particle" (which as early as 1894 he was referring to as the electron). Thus, in what was apparently the first specific prediction of time dilation, he wrote "... individual electrons describe corresponding parts of their orbits in times shorter for the system in the ratio (1 - v2/c2)1/2" (Larmor 1897).

Larmor held that the flow of charged particles constitutes the current of conduction (but was not part of the atom). Larmor calculated the rate of energy radiation from an accelerating electron. Larmor explained the splitting of the spectral lines in a magnetic field by the oscillation of electrons.

In 1919, Larmor proposed sunspots are self-regenerative dynamo action on the Sun's surface.

Motivated by his strong opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, in February 1911 Larmor ran for and was elected as Member of Parliament for Cambridge University (UK Parliament constituency) with the Liberal Unionist party. He remained in parliament until the 1922 general election, at which point the Irish question had been settled. Upon his retirement from Cambridge in 1932 Larmor moved back to County Down in Northern Ireland.