History of Special Relativity  

In General > s.a. special relativity / Michelson-Morley Experiment.
* Precursors: 1887, W Voigt published a paper in which he demanded form invariance of the wave equation in inertial frames (invariance of the speed of light and relativity principle) and obtained a set of spacetime transformations including t' = tvx/c2; This marked the birth of physical symmetries in field theories.
* Ether and the Michelson-Morley experiment: Crucial support for Einstein's special relativity was provided by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley's experiment in Cleveland in 1887, thad found no evidence of the ether; Despite what is now said, it appears that the conclusions of the Michelson-Morley experiment were not immediately clear and generally accepted; But in 1925, physicist Dayton Miller reported results of new experiments at Mount Wilson in California and claimed to find substantial signs of the ether; As late as the 1930s a review of the phenomena stated that the existence of the ether was a fact [< Harry Collins].
@ General references: Holton Isis(69); Tonnelat 71; Miller 81; Feuer 82; Darrigol HSPS(96); Staley Isis(98) [Germany, 1905–1911]; Logunov phy/04-book; Jammer FP(04); Will gq/05-proc [semi-pedagogical], AdP(05)gq [and tests]; Yuan phy/05 [and development of physics]; Ferraro in(07)-a0705; Field a0811 [re Langevin's 1911 paper; ?]; Ferraro a1302-ch; Wazeck 14 [1920s opposition]; Heras a1407, a1411 [Voigt's 1887 paper]; Petkov ed-20.
@ Specific topics: Bonizzoni & Giuliani phy/00 [time dilation]; Galison 03 [and clocks]; Roberts phy/06 [on Miller's results]; Provost a1211 [relativistic dynamics and the energy-momentum tensor, 1900-1912]; Carvalho Martins a1309 [and the nature of light].
> Related topics: see Ether; Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction; mass [E = mc2]; Thought Experiments.

Specific Contributions
@ Poincaré: Granek SHPMP(00); Reignier phy/00, Giulini in(05)phy [and Lorentz, Einstein]; Damour ht/05-conf; Cerf AJP(06)sep [what was missing]; Bracco & Provost a1001 [the electron and the 1905 Palermo Memoir]; Adlam a1112 [philosophical ideas underlying the approaches by Poincaré and Einstein]; Weinstein a1204; Messager et al CP(12); Bracco a1211 [role of quanta in Poincaré's and Einstein's ideas].
@ Einstein: Kennedy SHPMP(05) [1905 paper]; Brown EJP(05) [1905 misgivings]; Martínez 09 [spacetime, kinematics]; Weinstein a1204; Weinstein a1204 [Einstein and the Fizeau 1851 water tube experiment]; Weinstein a1204 [Mileva Marić's contributions]; Weinstein a1210 [Max Born, Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski's spacetime formalism]; Weinstein a1307 [Einstein's 1905 paper]; Bracco a1412 [Einstein and Milano, Besso, 1899-1901]; Engelhardt PE(16)-a1506 [Einstein's demonstration of time dilation]; Bodziony a1811 [1905 paper]; in sn(20)mar [Einstein's letters].
@ Minkowski: Bertolami a0804-in; Damour AdP(08)-a0807-in [analysis of "Raum und Zeit" lecture]; Goenner a0811 [and Finsler geometry].
@ Specific countries: ten Hagen a2002 [Belgium, 1910s and 1920s].


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