The Lorentz Transformation
Section Eleven
This chapter has some technical materials, and it should be read together with Appendix One. Don't be afraid of mathematics; it is a rather easy one, anyway. What's important is that, with this help of mathematics, the seeming incompatibility between the Principle of Relativity and the Law of Light can be beautifully resolved.
Can we conceive of a relation between place and time of the individual events relative to both reference-bodies, such that every ray of light possesses the velocity of transmission c relative to the embankment and relative to the train? This question leads to a quite definite positive answer, and to a perfectly definite transformation law for the space-time magnitudes of an event when changing over from one body of reference to another. (p. 35)
The Lorentz transformation was known before Einstein's 1905 paper; it already appeared in some of the papers by Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928), a Dutch physicist. But Lorentz and others, including Poincare, could not give a definite physical meaning to this transformation.
Einstein has shown that the Lorentz transformation (already known) can be derived from the combination of the Principle of Relativity and the Law of Propagation of Light, if we discard old prejudices as regards space and time and replace them by new ideas about space and time.
Last modified, April 23, 2002. (c) Soshichi Uchii
suchii@bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp
