George Francis FitzGerald
✓ Source-basedstableIrish physicist (1851-1901)
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.
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In their own words 2
When two surfaces at different temperatures are in presence of one another with a gas between them, there exists a force tending to separate them.
March 1878 quoted in (p. 18)
If Universities do not study useless subjects, who will?
(p. 392)
Awards 2
In their orbit 2
Scientists born in the 1850s 6
About this person
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.
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