George FitzGerald

George Francis FitzGerald, or Fitzgerald, (3 August 1851 - 22 February 1901) was a professor of "natural and experimental philosophy" (i.e., what is now called physics and chemistry) at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland in the late 19th century.

In 1883, following from Maxwell's equations, he suggested a device for producing rapidly oscillating electric current, to generate electromagnetic waves, a phenonenon first shown experimentally by Heinrich Hertz.

However, he is better known for his conjecture in 1894 that if all moving objects were foreshortened in the direction of their motion, it would account for the curious result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Mathematical equations that quantify this contraction were subsequently derived by Hendrik Lorentz in 1903, and the phenomenon is an essential element of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905, which provides an explanation of why such contraction occurs.

See also: Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis

External links

• A biography at the University of St Andrews School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences (http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/FitzGerald.html)
• A biography from the IASTE Hall of Fame (http://www.iaste.com/hall_of_fame/fitzgerald.html)