Woldemar Voigt - The Voigt Transformation

The Voigt Transformation

Further information: History of Lorentz transformations

In modern notation Voigt's transformation was

where . If the right-hand sides of his equations are multiplied by they are the modern Lorentz transformation. Hermann Minkowski said in 1908 that the transformations which play the main role in the principle of relativity were first examined by Voigt in 1887. Also Hendrik Lorentz (1909) is on record as saying he could have taken these transformations into his theory of electrodynamics, if only he had known of them, rather than developing his own. It is interesting then to examine the consequences of these transformations from this point of view. Lorentz might then have seen that the transformation introduced relativity of simultaneity, and also time dilation. However, the magnitude of the dilation was greater than the now accepted value in the Lorentz transformations. Moving clocks, obeying Voigt's time transformation, indicate an elapsed time, while stationary clocks indicate an elapsed time .

Lorentz did not adopt this transformation as he found in 1904 that only the Lorentz contraction corresponds to the principle of relativity. Since Voigt's transformation preserves the speed of light in all frames, the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment can not distinguish between the two transformations. The crucial question is the issue of time dilation. The experimental measurement of time dilation by Ives and Stillwell (1938) and others settled the issue in favor of the Lorentz transformation.