George Francis FitzGerald

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.