Background
Lorentz was born on July 18, 1853, in Aarnhem, Netherlands, the son of Gerrit Frederik Lorentz and his wife Geertruida van Ginkel. She died when Hendrik was young, and his father married Luberta Hupkes when the boy was nine.
From 1866 to 1869, Lorentz attended Hogere Burgerschool in Arnhem and was the first in his class. From an early age he was drawn to physical science, although he also read widely in Victorian novels and Reformation history. He was unusually quick with foreign languages, inferring grammar and idiom from context. At the age of nine he mastered the use of a table of logarithms.
Rapenburg 70, 2311 EZ Leiden, Netherlands
In 1870 Lorentz passed the examinations to qualify for the University of Leiden. By the end of the next year he had become a doctoral candidate. In June 1875 he received his doctoral degree; his dissertation revealed at one stroke his extraordinary grasp of what constituted at that time the most advanced and most portentous part of theoretical physics, J. C. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. He also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Paris and Cambridge.
1921
Albert Einstein and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, photographed by Ehrenfest in front of his home in Leiden in 1921.
From 1866 to 1869, Lorentz attended Hogere Burgerschool in Arnhem and was the first in his class. From an early age he was drawn to physical science, although he also read widely in Victorian novels and Reformation history. He was unusually quick with foreign languages, inferring grammar and idiom from context. At the age of nine he mastered the use of a table of logarithms.
Rapenburg 70, 2311 EZ Leiden, Netherlands
In 1870 Lorentz passed the examinations to qualify for the University of Leiden. By the end of the next year he had become a doctoral candidate. In June 1875 he received his doctoral degree; his dissertation revealed at one stroke his extraordinary grasp of what constituted at that time the most advanced and most portentous part of theoretical physics, J. C. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. He also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Paris and Cambridge.
Rumford Medal
Nobel Prize
Copley Medal
Portrait of Lorentz by Jan Veth
Lorentz-monument Park Sonsbeek in Arnhem, the Netherlands
Lorentz (left) at the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, here with Albert Einstein.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1147527709/?tag=2022091-20
Lorentz was born on July 18, 1853, in Aarnhem, Netherlands, the son of Gerrit Frederik Lorentz and his wife Geertruida van Ginkel. She died when Hendrik was young, and his father married Luberta Hupkes when the boy was nine.
From 1866 to 1869, Lorentz attended Hogere Burgerschool in Arnhem and was the first in his class. From an early age he was drawn to physical science, although he also read widely in Victorian novels and Reformation history. He was unusually quick with foreign languages, inferring grammar and idiom from context. At the age of nine he mastered the use of a table of logarithms.
In 1870 he passed the examinations to qualify for the University of Leiden. By the end of the next year he had become a doctoral candidate. In June 1875 he received his doctoral degree; his dissertation revealed at one stroke his extraordinary grasp of what constituted at that time the most advanced and most portentous part of theoretical physics, J. C. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. He also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Paris and Cambridge.
In 1871-1872 Lorentz taught high school physics and mathematics in Aarnhem. In June 1873 he returned to Leiden. By a fortunate coincidence, Dutch university education was expanded in 1877. At the University of Leiden a new chair in physics was set up for theoretical physics with the 24-year-old Lorentz as its first occupant. The next 20 years in Lorentz's life were a time of quiet, almost isolated study. He kept abreast of the latest publications in physics without, however, trying to make personal contacts with physicists abroad.
He did not in fact make his first international contact until 1897. After his appearance at the Congress of German Scientists and Physicians in Düsseldorf in 1897, Lorentz became a central figure of international gatherings of physicists. The 20 years spent in the privacy of his study where he walked up and down like a polar bear, had been rich in creative results. First came his highly successful textbooks in calculus and physics, the latter of which went through nine editions. Far more important was the gradual development of his electromagnetic theory, in which electromagnetism was based strictly on the existence of electrons that acted on each other through a stationary ether. His assumptions led directly to the interrelation between the frequency of the field and the value of the refractive index. These researches led Lorentz to the question of electrical and optical phenomena in moving bodies, a crucial issue in electromagnetic theory. As is well known, the uniform motion of bodies leaves those phenomena unchanged.
In 1895 Lorentz put forward the now famous transformation equations that explain this situation, or rather leave the fundamental equations of electromagnetism in the same form in all reference systems moving with uniform velocity with respect to one another. In 1903 he derived the principle that electromagnetic and optical phenomena are independent of the velocity of the system in which they take place, as long as the velocity is smaller than the velocity of light. The principle is known as Lorentz's principle of correlation, and its content is equivalent to that of the special theory of relativity spelled out by Albert Einstein with more incisive generality in 1905.
The most spectacular success of Lorentz's electromagnetic theory was not its anticipation of some of Einstein's great insights, but rather the explanation of the splitting of spectral lines in strong magnetic fields, first observed by Pieter Zeeman in 1896. Lorentz's electron theory received a full-fledged treatment in 1906 in his lectures at Columbia University, published under the title The Theory of Electrons. This first visit to the United States was followed by three more after World War I, to the California Institute of Technology and to Mt. Wilson Observatory.
After the war Lorentz was president of the famous Solvay Conferences for physics, a telling evidence of his stature in a generation that produced a galaxy of geniuses in physics. In his own country he served as director of the very complex studies preliminary to the closing of the Zuiderzee. Although in 1912 Lorentz became curator of the laboratory of the Teyler Stichting (Institute) in Haarlem, he continued at Leiden his Monday morning lectures, which were often attended by leading physicists from abroad. He died after a short illness on February 4, 1928.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
(Dutch Edition)
Although he grew up in Protestant circles, Lorentz was a freethinker in religious matters; he regularly attended the local French church to improve his French.
After World War I, Lorentz, cosmopolitanism took on a political cast. As president of the physics section of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Letters from 1909 to 1921, he used his influence to persuade his countrymen to join the postwar international scientific organizations created by the Allies. He sought to repeal the clauses excluding the Central Powers from the organizations and to restore true internationalism to science. In 1923 he became one of the seven members of the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, succeeding Henri Bergson as its president. Lorentz’ efforts to restore internationalism in science made little headway against the powerful nationalisms supporting the scientific boycott and counterboycott of the Central Powers. The continuing divisiveness of science was a source of great unhappiness to him.
During the first twenty years in Leiden, Lorentz was primarily interested in the electromagnetic theory of electricity, magnetism, and light. After that, he extended his research to a much wider area while still focusing on theoretical physics. Lorentz made significant contributions to fields ranging from hydrodynamics to general relativity. His most important contributions were in the area of electromagnetism, the electron theory, and relativity.
Lorentz had none of the mannerisms of the eccentric genius nor of the bookish ascetic. He was a disciplined scholar of regular habits and disposition. He was social, with a marked sense of humor and a gift for conversation; he always enjoyed a cigar and glass of wine with friends. To all who knew him, he seemed a man of remarkable inner harmony.
For a quarter-century Lorentz was a kind of institution at these and other international gatherings, where he presided as the willing and acknowledged leader of the physics discipline. Everyone remarked on his unsurpassed knowledge, his great tact, his ability to summarize lucidly the most tangled argument, and above all his matchless linguistic skill.
In 1881 Lorentz married Aletta Kaiser, the niece of his physics professor at Leiden, P. Kaiser. By 1897 he had become the father of two daughters and a son. Their first daughter, Geertruida Luberta, was born in 1885; their second, Johanna Wilhelmina, in 1889, Their first son died in infancy; their second, Rudolf, was born in 1895.