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
Relativity priority dispute and length contraction and time dilation ""are merely apparent phenomena due to motion with respect to the ether"". This is the fundamental difference in the two principal approaches to relativity theory, namely that of "Lorentz and Poincaré" on one side, and "Einstein and Minkowski" on the other side. Whittaker (1954) stated that David Hilbert had derived the theory of General Relativity from an elegant variational principle "almost simultaneously" with Einstein's discovery of the theory. From Fölsing's 1993 (English translation 1998) Einstein biography " Hilbert, like all his other colleagues, acknowledged Einstein as the sole creator of relativity theory." In 1997,