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Hendrik Antoon Lorentz ( ; ; 18 July 1853 – 4 February 1928) was a Dutch theoretical physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for their discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He derived the Lorentz transformation of the special theory of relativity, as well as the Lorentz force, which describes the force acting on a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. He was also responsible for the Lorentz oscillator model, a classical model used to describe the anomalous dispersion observed in dielectric materials when the driving frequency of the electric field was near the resonant frequency of the material, resulting in abnormal refractive indices.
Lorentz received many other honors and distinctions, including a term as Chairman of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the forerunner of UNESCO, from 1925 until his death in 1928.
From 1866 to 1869, Lorentz attended the Hogere Burgerschool in Arnhem, a new type of public high school recently established by Johan Thorbecke. His results in school were exemplary; not only did he excel in the physical sciences and mathematics, but also in English, French, and German. In 1870, he passed the exams in classical languages, which were then required for admission to university.
In 1870, Lorentz entered Leiden University, where he was strongly influenced by the teaching of astronomy professor Frederik Kaiser; it was his influence that led Lorentz to become a physicist. He earned his B.Sc. in 1871, and the following year returned to Arnhem to become a night school teacher. In 1875, he received his Ph.D. under Pieter Rijke with a thesis on the reflection and refraction of light, in which he refined the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell.
During his first 20 years at Leiden, Lorentz was primarily interested in the electromagnetic theory of electricity, magnetism, and light. After that, he extended his research to a much wider area while still focusing on theoretical physics. He made significant contributions to fields ranging from hydrodynamics to general relativity. His most important contributions were in the area of electromagnetism, the electron theory, and relativity.
In 1910, Lorentz decided to reorganize his career; his teaching and management duties at Leiden University were taking up too much of his time, leaving him little time for research. He initially asked Albert Einstein to succeed him as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leiden. However, Einstein did not accept, because he had just taken up a position at ETH Zurich and the prospect of having to fill Lorentz's shoes made him shiver. He ultimately chose Paul Ehrenfest as his successor.
In 1912, Lorentz resigned from his chair at Leiden University to become Curator of the Physical Cabinet at Teylers Museum in Haarlem. He continued to teach at Leiden as Extraordinary Professor, delivering his famous "Monday morning lectures" on new developments in theoretical physics.
In 1899 and again in 1904, Lorentz added time dilation to his transformations and published what Poincaré in 1905 named Lorentz transformations.
It was apparently unknown to Lorentz that Joseph Larmor had used identical transformations to describe orbiting electrons in 1897. Larmor's and Lorentz's equations look somewhat dissimilar, but they are algebraically equivalent to those presented by Poincaré and Einstein in 1905. Lorentz's 1904 paper includes the covariant formulation of electrodynamics, in which electrodynamic phenomena in different reference frames are described by identical equations with well defined transformation properties. The paper clearly recognizes the significance of this formulation, namely that the outcomes of electrodynamic experiments do not depend on the relative motion of the reference frame. The 1904 paper includes a detailed discussion of the increase of the inertial mass of rapidly moving objects in a useless attempt to make momentum look exactly like Newtonian momentum; it was also an attempt to explain the length contraction as the accumulation of "stuff" onto mass making it slow and contract.
In 1906, Lorentz's electron theory received a full-fledged treatment in his lectures at Columbia University, published under the title The Theory of Electrons.
The increase of mass was the first prediction of Lorentz and Einstein to be tested, but some experiments by Walter Kaufmann appeared to show a slightly different mass increase; this led Lorentz to the famous remark that he was "au bout de mon latin" ("at the end of my knowledge Latin" = at his wit's end) The confirmation of his prediction had to wait until 1908 and later (see Kaufmann–Bucherer–Neumann experiments).
Lorentz published a series of papers dealing with what he called "Einstein's principle of relativity". For instance, in 1909, 1910,
Though Lorentz still maintained that there is an (undetectable) aether in which resting clocks indicate the "true time":
Lorentz also gave credit to Poincaré's contributions to relativity.
Lorentz was also asked by the Dutch government to chair a committee to calculate some of the effects of the proposed Afsluitdijk (Enclosure Dam) flood control dam on water levels in the italic=no. Hydraulic engineering was mainly an empirical science at that time, but the disturbance of the tidal flow caused by the Afsluitdijk was so unprecedented that the empirical rules could not be trusted. Originally, Lorentz was only supposed to have a coordinating role in the committee, but it quickly became apparent that Lorentz was the only physicist to have any fundamental traction on the problem. In the period 1918 till 1926, Lorentz invested a large portion of his time in the problem. Lorentz proposed to start from the basic hydrodynamic equations of motion and solve the problem numerically. This was feasible for a "human computer", because of the quasi-one-dimensional nature of the water flow in the italic=no. The Afsluitdijk was completed in 1932, and the predictions of Lorentz and his committee turned out to be remarkably accurate. One of the two sets of locks in the Afsluitdijk was named after him.
Unique 1928 film footage of the funeral procession with a lead carriage followed by ten mourners, followed by a carriage with the coffin, followed in turn by at least four more carriages, passing by a crowd at the Grote Markt, Haarlem, from the Zijlstraat to the Smedestraat, and then back again through the Grote Houtstraat towards the Barteljorisstraat, on the way to the "Algemene Begraafplaats" at the Kleverlaan (northern Haarlem cemetery), has been digitized on YouTube. Hendrik Lorentz Amongst others, the funeral was attended by Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.
Lorentz is considered one of the prime representatives of the "Second Dutch Golden Age", a period of several decades surrounding 1900 in which the natural sciences flourished in the Netherlands.
Richardson describes Lorentz as:
M. J. Klein (1967) wrote of Lorentz's reputation in the 1920s:
Einstein wrote of Lorentz:
Poincaré (1902) said of Lorentz's theory of electrodynamics:
Paul Langevin (1911) said of Lorentz: (translated by J. B. Sykes, 1973).
Lorentz was chairman of the first Solvay Conference held in Brussels in the autumn of 1911. Shortly after the conference, Poincaré wrote an essay on quantum physics which gives an indication of Lorentz's status at the time:
Zeeman effect
Lorentz theorized that consist of , and suggested that the oscillations of these charged particles were the source of light. His colleague and former student, Pieter Zeeman, discovered the Zeeman effect in 1896, and Lorentz supplied its theoretical interpretation. This work earned them the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena".
Special relativity
In 1905, Einstein would use many of the concepts, mathematical tools and results Lorentz discussed to write his paper titled Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper (On the electrodynamics of moving bodies),. See also: English translation. known today as the special theory of relativity. Because Lorentz laid the fundamentals for the work by Einstein, this theory was originally called the Lorentz–Einstein theory.
1914. In his 1906 lectures published with additions in 1909 in the book "The theory of electrons" (updated in 1915), he spoke affirmatively of Einstein's theory:
General relativity
Lorentz was one of few scientists who supported Einstein's search for general relativity from the beginning – he wrote several research papers and discussed with Einstein personally and by letter. For instance, he attempted to combine Einstein's formalism with Hamilton's principle (1915),
and to reformulate it in a coordinate-free way (1916). Lorentz wrote in 1919:
Quantum mechanics
Lorentz gave a series of lectures in the fall of 1926 at Cornell University on the new quantum mechanics; in these he presented Erwin Schrödinger's wave mechanics.
Civil work
After World War I, Lorentz was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the Wetenschappelijke Commissie van Advies en Onderzoek in het Belang van Volkswelvaart en Weerbaarheid, a committee which was to harness the scientific potential united in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for solving civil problems such as food shortage which had resulted from the war. Lorentz was appointed chair of the committee. However, despite the best efforts of many of the participants the committee would harvest little success. The only exception being that it ultimately resulted in the founding of TNO, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research.
Family
In 1881, Lorentz married Aletta Catharina Kaiser, with whom he had two daughters and one son. The eldest daughter, Geertruida, was a physicist and a doctoral student of her father. She married Wander de Haas, who was the Director of the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory at Leiden University.
Death and funeral
In January 1928, Lorentz became seriously ill, and died shortly after on 4 February. The respect in which he was held in the Netherlands is apparent from Owen Richardson's description of his funeral:
Recognition
According to his biography published by the Nobel Foundation, "It may well be said that Lorentz was regarded by all theoretical physicists as the world's leading spirit, who completed what was left unfinished by his predecessors and prepared the ground for the fruitful reception of the new ideas based on the quantum theory."
A man of remarkable intellectual powers. Although steeped in his own investigation of the moment, he always seemed to have in his immediate grasp its ramifications into every corner of the universe. The singular clearness of his writings provides a striking reflection of his wonderful powers in this respect. He possessed and successfully employed the mental vivacity which is necessary to follow the interplay of discussion, the insight which is required to extract those statements which illuminate the real difficulties, and the wisdom to lead the discussion among fruitful channels, and he did this so skillfully that the process was hardly perceptible.
For many years physicists had always been eager "to hear what Lorentz will say about it" when a new theory was advanced, and, even at seventy-two, he did not disappoint them.
Awards
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Lorentz received a great many honors for his outstanding work. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1905. The society awarded him their Rumford Medal and Copley Medal medals in 1908 and 1918, respectively. He was elected an Honorary Member of the Netherlands Chemical Society in 1912. Honorary members – website of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society He was an International Member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Categories: 1853 Births, 1928 Deaths, 20th-century Dutch Physicists, Dutch Nobel Laureates, 19th-century Dutch Physicists, Leiden University Alumni, Academic Staff Of Leiden University, Nobel Laureates In Physics, Recipients Of The Copley Medal, Scientists From Arnhem, Relativity Theorists, Foreign Members Of The Royal Society, Foreign Associates Of The National Academy Of Sciences, Members Of The Royal Netherlands Academy Of Arts And Sciences, Corresponding Members Of The Russian Academy Of Sciences, Corresponding Members Of The Ussr Academy Of Sciences, Honorary Members Of The Ussr Academy Of Sciences, Recipients Of The Pour Le Mérite, Dutch Theoretical Physicists, Members Of Teylers Tweede Genootschap, Fellows Of The Royal Society Of Edinburgh, Recipients Of Franklin Medal, International Members Of The American Philosophical Society
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