# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/george-francis-fitzgerald
# Generated: 2026-08-15T11:52:53.339Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/george-francis-fitzgerald"
name: "George Francis FitzGerald"
slug: "george-francis-fitzgerald"
description: "He proposed that objects shrink when they move — a idea that sounded absurd in 1889 and became the backbone of how we understand space and time."
tagline: "Irish physicist (1851–1901)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/PSM_V63_D476_George_Francis_FitzGerald.png?width=1200"
gender: "male"
category:
  name: "Scientists"
  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
  name: "Scientist"
  slug: "scientist"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1851-08-03"
deathDate: "1901-02-21"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           51.91
  momentum:             0.154320987654321
  historical:           22.10219866666667
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  60
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
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  country:  null
  category: 98
tags:
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  - name: "Scientist"
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  - name: "Physics"
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  - name: "19th Century"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  George Francis FitzGerald was born on 3 August 1851 in Ireland and worked as a theoretical physicist at a time when the behaviour of light was breaking classical physics. He hypothesised length contraction: the notion that an object's dimensions compress along its direction of motion, a radical fix for problems in electromagnetic theory that most dismissed as mathematical sleight of hand. Einstein's 1905 special relativity made the hypothesis fundamental — not a trick but a property of the universe itself. FitzGerald died on 21 February 1901, four years before vindication arrived.