brainoil comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 September 2007 06:57PM

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Comment author: private_messaging 17 April 2014 07:34:55AM *  0 points [-]

Lengths changing around is called "Lorentz transformations", and pre-dates 1901:

Main article: History of Lorentz transformations

Many physicists, including Woldemar Voigt, George FitzGerald, Joseph Larmor, and Hendrik Lorentz himself had been >discussing the physics implied by these equations since 1887.[1]

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 the conjecture that bodies in motion are being contracted, in order to explain the >baffling outcome of the 1887 ether-wind experiment of Michelson and Morley. In 1892, Lorentz independently presented >the same idea in a more detailed manner, which was subsequently called FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction hypothesis.[2] >Their explanation was widely known before 1905.[3]

It took time and combined effort of many smart people to finalize the full theory complete with dynamics; the most fundamental bits such as transformations came first.

At Einstein's level, human abilities top out - it's like world's best athletes, the second best, the 100th best, they run about the same speed, for all practical purposes. Remaining variability in total distance those athletes run in their lifetime is largely due to how hard they work, and that one is also topping out. And the variability in how a layperson would attribute and misattribute discoveries has to do with quite random factors.