Abstract
The historical development of the Theory of Special Relativity offers a rather complicated and confusing impression. At the end of the nineteenth century we find several important philosophical investigations by Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré about the underlying philosophical prejudices of Newton’s theory of space and time and of classical mechanics. In addition, we find important mathematical contributions by Poincaré and Lorentz about the structure of space and time. Finally, there was an extensive discussion about the meaning of the Michelson experiment, which was considered – erroneously – by many physicists as an experimentum crucis for the validity of Special Relativity. Actually, the Michelson experiment demonstrates merely the isotropy of the so-called two-ways velocity of light. We will come back to this point later.
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- 1.
Huber (2000).
- 2.
Stachel (1989).
- 3.
Stachel (1982).
- 4.
- 5.
We will not discuss here the reasons for the inadequacy of this axiomatic approach.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Mach (1901).
- 9.
More details about the two Helmholtz theorems can be found in Section 2.6.
- 10.
Poincaré (1898).
- 11.
Mittelstaedt (1976/89).
- 12.
Other empirical methods for the determination of ω are for instance the time dilatation of moving clocks or the increase of the inertial mass of moving bodies. More details are discussed in Section 2.4.
- 13.
Mittelstaedt (2006).
- 14.
Hawking and Ellis (1973), p. 38.
- 15.
Here and in the following we use bold letters for spatial three-vectors.
- 16.
Gamov (1946).
- 17.
Sexl and Urbantke (1992), p. 69.
- 18.
Mittelstaedt (1976/89).
- 19.
Mittelstaedt (2003).
- 20.
Becker (1965), p. XIII f.
- 21.
Stachel (2002).
- 22.
Laugwitz (1960), pp. 145–149.
- 23.
Marzke and Wheeler (1964).
- 24.
Ehlers et al. (1972).
- 25.
Schröter and Schelb (1994).
- 26.
Hawking and Ellis (1973).
- 27.
Petrow (1964).
- 28.
Hawking and Ellis (1973), p. 85.
- 29.
Wheeler (1973).
- 30.
Mittelstaedt (1976), pp. 64–66.
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Mittelstaedt, P. (2013). Reconstruction of Special and General Relativity. In: Rational Reconstructions of Modern Physics. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 174. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5593-2_2
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