Physicist — George Francis FitzGerald (Dublin, 1851 – Dublin, 1901) was an Irish physicist, professor at Trinity College Dublin. He was among the first supporters of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory in the English-speaking world and promoted its spread. In 1889, to explain the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment — which failed to detect the Earth’s motion through the ether — he proposed the idea that moving bodies contract in the direction of motion. The same hypothesis was advanced independently by Lorentz, and the “Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction” later became a natural element of Einstein’s special relativity. He died prematurely at 49.
Trivia
He proposed the idea of length contraction in a short letter to the American journal Science; the article went almost unnoticed and FitzGerald long thought it had never been published.
Theories and contributions
- Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction — Moving bodies contract in the direction of motion by a factor , explaining the null outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Present in chapters
Linked atoms
1 linked atoms.