| George Fitzgerald |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT GEORGE FITZGERALD | |
| 1851 births | |
| 1901 deaths | |
| relativists | |
| irish physicists | |
| people associated with trinity college, dublin | |
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George Francis FitzGerald ( 3 August 1851 – 21 February 1901 ) was a professor of "natural and experimental philosophy" (i.e., what is now called physics and chemistry) at Trinity College , Dublin , in the late 19th century. In 1883, following from Maxwell's Equations , he suggested a device for producing rapidly oscillating electric current, to generate Electromagnetic Wave s, a phenonenon first shown experimentally by Heinrich Hertz . However, he is better known for his conjecture in 1894 that if all moving objects were foreshortened in the direction of their motion, it would account for the curious result of the Michelson-Morley Experiment . Mathematical equations that quantify this contraction were subsequently derived by Hendrik Lorentz in 1903, and the phenomenon is an essential element of Albert Einstein 's Special Theory Of Relativity , published in 1905, which provides an explanation of why such contraction occurs. See also: Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction Hypothesis EXTERNAL LINKS |
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