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Re: Confirmation of Relativity



At 02:44 PM 05/03/2000 -0500, Tim Folkerts wrote:
I'm sure that most of us are aware that the lifetime of moving muons
provied a direct confirmation of time dilation. But today a students asked
about length contraction, and I had to admit I couldn't think of any
experiment that directly measured the effect. Of course, it has to work
for the rest of the theory to work, but is there a clear experiment that
confirms it directly?

Tim Folkerts
Fort Hays State University

How about the Michelson-Morley experiment. It lead, I believe, George F.
Fitzgerald to think that maybe the problem with the experiment lay with
the concept of length. He presumed that there might be a small contraction
in length of the earth's travel which would explain why there was no
difference in travel time for the two light beams traveling perpendicular
to each other. In 1895 Hendrik Lorentz came to the same conclusion as
Fitzgerald, but went even further. He thought that mass would also have to
increase with velocity. He speculated that if an object were to achieve
light speed, it would have an infinite mass.

All this before Einstein came along.

Glenn

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