What Happened To The Principle Of Relativity?
| Article | |
|---|---|
| Title | What Happened To The Principle Of Relativity? |
| Author(s) | Harry Hamlin Ricker |
| Published in | Beyond Mainstream |
| Date | 2019-08-21 |
| Subject area | Physics |
| Topics | relativity, aether, Lorentz |
Read online | Read the full article |
| Retrieved | 2026-07-23 |
"What Happened To The Principle Of Relativity?" is an article by Harry Hamlin Ricker published on 21 August 2019 on Beyond Mainstream.
Ricker returns to Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis of 1902, where the principle of relativity is given the status of a unifying principle across mathematics and physics and is shown to be preserved by Lorentz's electrodynamics. Einstein, he argues, drew deeply on that book and made the principle his cornerstone, yet interpreted it differently: where Poincaré accepted Lorentz's solution to the aether problem as securing the principle, Einstein rejected it. Ricker questions whether that departure was the advance it is usually taken to be.