On some other approaches to electrodynamics in 1905

pp. 2-28

in: Arthur I. Miller, Frontiers of physics: 1900–1911, Basel, Birkhäuser, 1986

Abstract

The thrust of fundamental research in 1905 was, as it is today, toward the unification of physics within a field-theoretical framework. During the first decade of the twentieth century many physicists believed that this goal was imminent, and their researches possessed an elegance and significance that seventy-four years of relativity have tended to obscure. Albert Einstein's paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," the relativity paper, appeared September 26, 1905, but until 1911 many physicists referred to a "Lorentz-Einstein theory." Einstein's first paper on electrodynamics was considered to have enriched current research. This essay discusses some different approaches to those problems in electrodynamics that we now think of as posing the same puzzle — that is, relativity. The approaches to be analyzed are the theories of the electron that were proposed by Max Abraham, Paul Langevin, and H. A. Lorentz; these theories will be compared with each other and with Einstein's work. Recently discovered correspondence of Lorentz and Henri Poincaré will enable us to catch a glimpse of the drama that is science in the making.¹