Commentary on Ritz's Electrodynamics - Part 3 9. - Absolute Motion. (197-205) [Evans] ... Ritz discusses special relativity. Here, I am less sure that Ritz grasped the full significance of the special theory of relativity, but since that theory was only three years old at the time of writing (1908) this is not surprising. He is reluctant to accept Einstein's 1905 paper, preferring the earlier suggestions by Poincaré and Lorentz. Evans goes to bat for Einstein's two postulates of relativity and then states: [Evans] This notwithstanding, the criticisms of the 1905 paper by Melbourne Evans in about 1960 are valid. It is time that the academic physicists considered this analysis. However successful, the logical basics of special relativity are troublesome. Similar problems appear in QED, as described most vividly by Feynman himself. Ritz senses this trouble with special relativity, but in my own opinion he does not give Einstein the credit due to him. Perhaps there was an element of personal rivalry, as is so often the case in real-life physics. [Evans] Ritz finds the FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction impossible to swallow: [Ritz] "It is evident that this hypothesis confuses our notions of solids,..." and "Does the assertion of the reality of this contraction have any sense? It results, from the researches of Einstein, to which we return later on, that the answer is negative." [The idea is that the contractions are only observationally apparent.] [Evans] We are led to expect that Ritz will now regurgitate the Einstein theory without criticism, but he does not. This is either very perceptive or a lack of understanding of Einstein's reasoning, I am not sure which. He accepts the need to eliminate absolute motion as addressed by Lorentz, Poincaré and Einstein, 1903 to 1905: [Ritz] "If therefore we do not wish to admit that the speed of light depends on that of bodies emitting it, and is purely relative, like all speeds (and the ether concept alone prevents drawing out of the relativity principle this so natural consequence) we will have to modify the definition of time." [Evans] There is an inherent contradiction in this understanding of the Einstein Principle, the signal velocity c is a universal constant and Lorentz invariant. This at once abolishes and uniquely depends on the ether, according to Ritz. ... 10. - Summary and Conclusions. (205-209) [Evans] Repeated readings of these characteristically brilliant criticisms by Walter Ritz has led me to conclude that he rejected, at least in part, the notion of in-vacuo electromagnetic transversality. The idea of ether was firmly rejected and with it, the notion of light propagation in a strange elastic medium (light-ether or lichtaether) which supports only transverse waves with no resistance to compression and with unstable mechanical equilibrium. [Evans]... Ritz leaves open the question of whether the Fresnel diffraction experiments prove transversality or not. ...With this single, but important, reservation I feel that Ritz almost certainly rejected transversality in the vacuum as early as 1908, at a point when the new Lorentz theory was in its relative infancy and by no means widely accepted Ritz knew that the speed of light aspect of his preliminary hypothesis was not consistent with Fizeau's experiment on the entrainment of waves. It was a result of his insistence on honoring the superposition theorem. (His fictitious particles were not affected in their actions on matter.) He did this to be faithful to Lorentz's model. (It is as though D'Artagnan was fighting with one hand tied behind his back.) He planned a revision, ... but he died in 1909, at age 31, and his work languishes. Perhaps the time is right for more musketeers. References (E1) Einstein, A., Sidelights on Relativity (1922 translation), p. 11. (E2) Evans, M., Commentary on Ritz's 1908 electrodynamics article. His commentary, which is pro-Einsteinan in outlook, was prepared as an accompaniment to an English translation of the Ritz article, that is "slated" to appear in the on-line journal Apeiron. [The translation was never submitted, (author had other irons in fire) but Professor Evans kindly gave permission for his comments to be used in this Philadelphia NPA paper. 12 Feb 2005.] (H1) Hovgaard, W., Ritz's Electrodynamic Theory, Math & Phys, 218, (1931-1932) (L1) Lorentz. H.A., Theory of Electrons910)...(ref is incomplete) (R1) Ritz, W., Recherches Critiques Sur L'Electrodynamique Generale; Ann. de Chim. et de Phys3, 145 (1908). For an English translation of the Introduction and First Part of this work, titled Critical Researches on General Electrodynamics, contact R.S. Fritzius at fritzius@bellsouth.net (R2) Ritz, W., La gravitation, Scientia, 10, 2, (1909). (RE) Ritz, W., and A. Einstein, Phys. Zeits.,10, 323, (1909). For an English translation and commentary on this article, see, Fritzius, R., The Ritz-Einstein Agreement to Disagree, Physics Essays, 3, 371, (1990). A reprint of this article is on this web site. Postscripts For a current Pro Ritz viewpoint I recommend the 1995 "History of Physics" article titled Walter Ritz as a theoretical physicist and his research on the theory of atomic spectra, by M.A. El'yaschevich, N.G. Kembrovskaya, and L.M. Tomil'chik which appeared in Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, Vol 165, pp. 435-455. The article, in English, touches on 23 of Ritz's 25 publications. In addition to the technical details in the history, the authors make the following statements about Ritz and how his ideas have been handled. Page numbers in parentheses are from thir article. "..his [Ritz's] actual role in the prehistory of theoretical spectroscopy was much more significant than is usually accepted, and the real scale and originality of his personality have not yet been given proper acknowledgement." (p. 435) "His untimely death was bitterly regretted by such scientists as Rayleigh, Sommerfield and Rozhdestvenskií." (p. 436) "While describing the scientific work of Ritz, it should be stressed that the modern historiography devoted to him is extremely scanty." (p. 436) "Analysis of the elastic and magnetic atomic models proposed by Ritz to explain spectral regularities is completely absent; ..." (p. 436) "Practically no reference is made to Ritz's works in the account of the history of electrodynamics, although they, undoubtedly are worthy of this. The only publication in the world which is specifically devoted to his scientific activity as a whole seems to be an article by the American science historian Forman published in volume 11 of the multi-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited in 1976 (Charles Schribner, New York). Regretfully, this excellently written and very informative essay is as little known to physicists as the complete works collection itself." (p. 436) "The astonishing, although now little known, fact remains that Ritz managed to construct mathematical models from which one can logically derive, as natural consequences, analytical expressions for the spectral terms and their differences which not only excellently fitted the experiments, but were also confirmed later on by the quantum theory. " (p. 437) "...it is necessary to emphasize that one cannot agree with the purely negative assessment of Ritz's studies on electrodynamics which constitute a very significant part of his scientific heritage." (p. 438) "Usually attention is exclusively fixed on the point of Ritz's general concept which is connected with denying one of the basic postulates of special relativity theory, the principle of the independence of light speed from the source velocity." (p. 438) "In Ritz's studies on electrodynamics one can clearly distinguish the critical and constructive parts, each of which is worth further historical and methodological analysis." (p. 438) -------- Paul Forman's biography on Ritz, mentioned above, closes with the opinion that the Michelson-Morley experiment, repeated in 1924 with astronomical light sources, told against Ritz's theory. (For a counter argument see John Fox's article, Evidence Against Emisson Theories, Am. J. Phys., 67, 1 (1965).