Re: Doppler question

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

The Holton article I have dates from 1960. Einstein was dead at that
point and philosophers were free to speculate. The only statement I
can find regarding Michelson Morley is:

  "The paper does not invoke explicitly **any** of the well-known
  experimental difficulties - and the Michelson and Michelson-Morley
  experiments are not even mentioned when the opportunity arises to
  show in what manner the RT accounts for them."

**emphasis is mine**

To suggest that this sentence implies Holton believes Einstein was
unaware of the Michelson-Morley experiment is, I think, a delusion
in the eye of the beholder. It appears to this beholder that Holton
considers the Michelson-Morely result to have been a member of the
standard set of contemporary "well-known experimental difficulties".

The journal in which Einstein published, *Annalen der Physik*, had
carried several papers on the problem of the electrodynamics of
moving bodies in the four years preceding Einstein's 1905 paper.
Poincar=E9 had enunciated his principle of relativity in 1904, and
Lorentz had worked out much of the necessary arithmetic in 1903,
though neither published in *Annalen*, and as I said before,
Einstein made no footnote citations in his paper, though he did
acknowledge Poincar=E9 and Lorentz by name.

I note also that Holton was the editor of the AAPT SRT booklet and
he did not feel it necessary to include anyone else's paper on the
origins of SRT in it, though he has given space to such nonsense as
Dingle's attack on SRT through the twin "paradox". I wish I could
see a copy of the first citation, a 1923 translation of memoirs of
Einstein, Lorentz, Minkowsky and Weyl.

Let me strongly caution again against a modernism that has crept
into the store of misconceptions. It is not clear that Einstein was
unaware of the Michelson-Morely experiment in 1905.

I wonder if Mileva had ever heard of it?

Leigh

> Now that Tim has mentioned it, I recall an article by Holton from AJP that
> makes the same claim. It was collected in the AAPT reader on relativity,
> but the original article dates from 1958, I think.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Bruce Callen
> > Gerald Holton has a chapter is his book "Thematic Origins of Scientific
> > Thought" on this issue. He looks at quite a lot of evidence and builds a
> > convincing, albeit circumstantial, case that Einstein didn't know of
> > Michelson-Morley. I haven't read the article for several years so I
> > don't remember many of the fine points. A good read, though.
> >
> > -Tim
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