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Woldemar Voigt

Woldemar Voigt (September 2, 1850 – December 13, 1919) was a German physicist.

He was born in Leipzig, and died in Göttingen. He was a student of Franz Ernst Neumann. He worked on crystal physics, thermodynamics and electro-optics. His main work was the Lehrbuch der Kristallphysik (textbook on crystal physics), first published in 1910. He discovered the Voigt effect in 1898. The word tensor in its current meaning was introduced by him in 1899. Voigt profile and Voigt notation are named after him. He was also an amateur musician and became known as a Bach expert (see External links).

In 1887 Voigt^[1] formulated a form of the Lorentz transformation between a rest frame of reference and a frame moving with speed v in the x direction. However, as Voigt himself declared the transformation was aimed for a specific problem and did not carry with it the ideas of a general coordinate transformation, as is the case in relativity theory. (Ernst et al. (2001) suggests an alternative controversial interpretation).

The Voigt transformation

Further information: History of Lorentz transformations

In modern notation Voigt's transformation was

where . If the right-hand sides of his equations are multiplied by γ they are the modern Lorentz transformation. Hermann Minkowski said in 1908 that the transformations which play the main role in the principle of relativity were first examined by Voigt in 1887. Also Hendrik Lorentz (1909) is on record as saying he could have taken these transformations into his theory of electrodynamics, if only he had known of them, rather than developing his own. It is interesting then to examine the consequences of these transformations from this point of view. Lorentz might then have seen that the transformation introduced relativity of simultaneity, and also time dilation. However, the magnitude of the dilation was greater than the now accepted value in the Lorentz transformations. Moving clocks, obeying Voigt's time transformation, indicate an elapsed time Δt_Voigt = γ ^{− 2}Δt = γ ^{− 1}Δt_Lorentz, while stationary clocks indicate an elapsed time Δt.

If Lorentz had adopted this transformation, it would have been a matter of experiment to decide between them and the modern Lorentz transformation. Since Voigt's transformation preserves the speed of light in all frames, the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment can not distinguish between the two transformations. The crucial question is the issue of time dilation. The experimental measurement of time dilation by Ives and Stillwell (1938) and others settled the issue in favor of the Lorentz transformation.

Footnotes

1. ^ See Ernst and Hsu (2001) for an English translation of Voigt (1887a).

References

Primary Sources

• Voigt, W. (1887a), “Ueber das Doppler'sche Princip”, Göttinger Nachrichten (no. 7): 41-51 ; Reprinted with additional comments by Voigt in Physikalische Zeitschrift XVI, 381 - 386 (1915).

• Voigt, W. (1887b), “Theorie des Lichts für bewegte Medien”, Göttinger Nachrichten (no. 8): 177-238 ; This article ends with the announcement that in a forthcoming article the principles worked out so far shall be applied to the problems of reflection and refraction. The article contains on p. 235, last paragraph, and on p. 236, 2nd paragraph, a judgment on the Michelson experiment of 1886, which Voigt, after a correspondence with H. A. Lorentz in 1887 and 1888, has partly withdrawn in the article announced, namely in a footnote in Voigt (1888). According to Voigt's first judgment, the Michelson experiment must yield a null result, independently of whether the Earth transports the luminiferous aether with it (Fizeau's 1st aether hypothesis), or whether the Earth moves through an entirely independent, self-consistent universal luminiferous aether (Fizeau's 2nd aether hypothesis).

• Voigt, W. (1888), “Theorie des Lichts für bewegte Medien”, Annalen der Physik 35: 370-396, 524-551 ; In a footnote on p. 390 of this article, Voigt corrects his earlier judgment, made in Göttinger Nachrichten No. 8, p. 235 and p. 236 (1887), and states indirectly that, after a correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, he can no longer maintain that in the case of the validity of Fizeau's 2nd aether hypothesis the Michelson experiment must yield a null result too.

• Bucherer, A. H. (1908), “Messungen an Becquerelstrahlen. Die experimentelle Bestätigung der Lorentz-Einsteinschen Theorie”, Physikalische Zeitschrift 9 (22): 755-762 ; For Minkowski's statement see p. 762.

• Lorentz, H.A (1916), The theory of electrons, Leipzig & Berlin: B.G. Teubner ; See p. 198.

Secondary sources

• Ernst, A. and Hsu, J.-P. (2001), “First proposal of the universal speed of light by Voigt 1887”, Chinese Journal of Physics 39 (3): 211-230 ; Contains the English Translation of Voigt (1887a).

• Macrossan, M. N. (1986), “A Note on Relativity Before Einstein”, Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 37: 232-234 

External links

• The relativity of light (MathPages)
• Bach expert Woldemar Voigt
• Works by or about Woldemar Voigt in libraries (WorldCat catalog)