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 of the relativity principle: Lorentz, Einstein, Poincaré and Planck. And in his famous lecture (1908) he mentioned Voigt, Lorentz and Einstein. Minkowski himself considered Einstein's theory as a generalization of Lorentz's and credited Einstein for completely stating the relativity of time, but he criticized his predecessors for not fully developing the relativity of space. However, modern historians of science argue that Minkowski's claim for priority was unjustified, because Minkowski (like Wien or Abraham) adhered to the electromagnetic world-picture and apparently didn't fully understand the difference between Lorentz's electron theory and Einstein's kinematics. In 1908, Einstein and Laub rejected the four-dimensional