1890 – Ireland
1904 – Holland
A moving object appears to contract
The contraction is negligible unless the object’s speed is close to the speed of light.
In 1890 Fitzgerald suggested that an object moving through space would shrink slightly in its direction of travel by an amount dependent on its speed.
In 1904 Lorentz independently studied this problem from an atomic point of view and derived a set of equations to explain it. A year later, Einstein derived Lorentz’s equations independently from his special theory of relativity.
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history of science 101 