Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (July 18, 1853 – February 4, 1928)Lorentz was a Dutch physicist and the winner of the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on electromagnetic radiation. Today, his name is associated with the Lorentz-Lorenz formula and the Lorentz transformation. In 1895 in an attempt to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment, Lorentz proposed that moving bodies contract in the direction of motion; George FitzGerald had arrived at this conclusion independently. Today this is known as the FitzGerald-Lorentz Contraction. In 1899, Lorentz added time dilation to his transformations and published what Poincaré named the Lorentz transformations. These mathematical formulas describe basic effects of the theory of Special Relativity, the increase of mass, shortening of length, and time dilation that are characteristic of a moving body. Works |