Ludwik Silberstein

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Ludwik Silberstein (born May 17, 1872 in Warsaw , † January 17, 1948 ) was a Polish-American physicist .

Silberstein studied in Krakow , Heidelberg and Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1894 (on the mechanical conception of electromagnetic phenomena in insulators and semiconductors). From 1895 he taught in Lemberg, Bologna (from 1899) and at the University of Rome (from 1904). At the same time as teaching in Rome, he worked for the optical company Adam Hilger Ltd. from 1912 to 1920. in London and lectured at University College London . In 1920 he went to the USA and worked as a consultant for Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York , where he retired in 1929. In the United States and Canada he gave lectures on relativity theory at the University of Chicago , the University of Toronto and Cornell University, among others .

In 1914 he published one of the first textbooks of the theory of relativity in England (about the same time as a book by Ebenezer Cunningham ), "The theory of relativity", in which he also clearly emphasized the fundamental new understanding of the theory by Albert Einstein . The book emerged from lectures at University College in London in 1912/13. This was preceded by a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Cambridge in 1912 on the quaternionic form of the theory of relativity.

In 1918 he published his own theory of gravity as an alternative to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR), which managed without the equivalence principle , which was dubious in Silberstein's eyes, and in which instead a constant space-time curvature was postulated independently of the existing masses. The theory, however, yielded only one sixth of the value of the perihelion rotation for Mercury from Einstein's theory, which is in good agreement with the observation.

In 1935 he believed he had found an error in Einstein's general theory of relativity (a static axially symmetric solution with two singularities corresponding to two point masses), which led to a controversy with Einstein, which was also echoed in newspapers, because Silberstein did not want to see his error.

He also wrote books on vector calculus, optics, and general relativity and translated books by Max Planck and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz into English.

literature

  • José Sanchez-Ron: The reception of special relativity in Great Britain, in Thomas Glick (editor): The Comparative Reception of Relativity, Springer 2007 (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol. 103)
  • Peter Havas, The General-Relativistic Two-Body Problem and the Einstein-Silberstein Controversy, in: Earman, Norton, Janssen (editor): The Attraction of Gravitation - new studies in the history of general relativity, Birkhäuser 1993, p. 88– 125

Fonts

  • "The theory of relativity," MacMillan 1914, online
  • Elements of the electromagnetic theory of light, Longmans, Green and Company, London 1918
  • Simplified method of tracing rays through any optical system of lenses, prisms, and mirrors, Longmans, Green and Company 1918
  • Vectorial Mechanics, Macmillan 1926
  • Elements of Vector Algebra, Longmans, Green and Company 1919
  • Projective vector algebra; an algebra of vectors independent of the axioms of congruence and of parallels, London, G. Bell 1919
  • The size of the universe; attempts at a determination of the curvature radius of spacetime, Oxford University Press 1930
  • The theory of general relativity and gravitation, Van Nostrand 1922 (lectures in Toronto 1921)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ludwik Silberstein, Quaternionic form of relativity, Philosophical Magazine, Vol. 23, 1912, pp. 790-809
  2. ↑ Silberstein saw the prediction of the redshift of the spectral lines in the GTR, a direct consequence of the equivalence principle, as refuted.
  3. ^ Silberstein, General relativity without the equivalence principle, Philosophical Magazine, Vol. 36, 1918, pp. 94-128. Also Earman, Janssen in Earman u. a. The Attraction of Gravitation 1993
  4. ↑ These should actually attract each other and thus make the solution unstable. Silberstein "Two-Centers Solution of the Gravitational Field Equations, and the Need for a Reformed Theory of Matter", Physical Review Vol. 49, 1936, pp. 268-270. Einstein and Nathan Rosen responded in "Two-Body Problem in General Relativity," Physical Review, Vol. 49, 1936, pp. 404-405
personal data
SURNAME Silberstein, Ludwik
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 1948