History of special relativity History of special relativity The history of special relativity consists of many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. It culminated in the theory of special relativity proposed by Albert Einstein and subsequent work of Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others. Although Isaac Newton based his physics on absolute time and space, he also adhered to the principle of relativity of Galileo Galilei restating it precisely for mechanical systems . This can be stated as: as far as the laws of mechanics are concerned, all observers in inertial motion are equally
History of special relativity students, Max von Laue and Kurd von Mosengeil, in this formulation. He described Einstein's theory as a "generalization" of Lorentz's theory and, to this "Lorentz-Einstein-Theory", he gave the name "relative theory"; while Alfred Bucherer changed Planck's nomenclature into the now common "theory of relativity". On the other hand, Einstein himself and many others continued to refer simply to the new method as the "relativity principle". And in an important overview article on the relativity principle (1908a), Einstein described SR as a "union of Lorentz's theory and the relativity principle", including the fundamental assumption that Lorentz's local time can be described