Lorentz Transformation - History

History

See also History of Lorentz transformations.

Many physicists, including Woldemar Voigt, George FitzGerald, Joseph Larmor, Hendrik Lorentz had been discussing the physics behind these equations since 1887. Larmor and Lorentz, who believed the luminiferous ether hypothesis, were seeking the transformation under which Maxwell's equations were invariant when transformed from the ether to a moving frame. Early in 1889, Oliver Heaviside had shown from Maxwell's equations that the electric field surrounding a spherical distribution of charge should cease to have spherical symmetry once the charge is in motion relative to the ether. FitzGerald then conjectured that Heaviside’s distortion result might be applied to a theory of intermolecular forces. Some months later, FitzGerald published his conjecture in Science to explain the baffling outcome of the 1887 ether-wind experiment of Michelson and Morley. This idea was extended by Lorentz and Larmor over several years, and became known as the FitzGerald-Lorentz explanation of the Michelson-Morley null result, known early on through the writings of Lodge, Lorentz, Larmor, and FitzGerald. Their explanation was widely known before 1905. Larmor is also credited to have been the first to understand the crucial time dilation property inherent in his equations.

In 1905, Henri Poincaré was the first to recognize that the transformation has the properties of a mathematical group, and named it after Lorentz. Later in the same year Einstein derived the Lorentz transformation under the assumptions of the principle of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light in any inertial reference frame, obtaining results that were algebraically equivalent to Larmor's (1897) and Lorentz's (1899, 1904), but with a different interpretation.

Paul Langevin (1911) said of the transformation:

It is the great merit of H. A. Lorentz to have seen that the fundamental equations of electromagnetism admit a group of transformations which enables them to have the same form when one passes from one frame of reference to another; this new transformation has the most profound implications for the transformations of space and time. —Paul Langevin