Re:Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction
by perihelions on Thursday February 15, 2024 @05:12AM
(#39380968)
- "Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C."
It's not enough, unless you explicitly insist that Maxwell's equations are invariant under coordinate transforms. This step is so obvious from the modern perspective that it's easy to overlook (the grandparent comment is insightful!) But pre-modern physicists thought it was the opposite which was intuitively obvious: that the constant "c" in Maxwell's equations implied the existence of a fixed frame in which solely those equations were valid. That Maxwell's equations should "obviously" transform in some different way in which c is additive, like the speed of sound.
Sure; the Lorentz coordinate transformation falls directly out of Maxwell's equations—if, only if, you add that particular coordinate-invariance condition.
It's not enough, unless you explicitly insist that Maxwell's equations are invariant under coordinate transforms. This step is so obvious from the modern perspective that it's easy to overlook (the grandparent comment is insightful!) But pre-modern physicists thought it was the opposite which was intuitively obvious: that the constant "c" in Maxwell's equations implied the existence of a fixed frame in which solely those equations were valid. That Maxwell's equations should "obviously" transform in some different way in which c is additive, like the speed of sound.
Sure; the Lorentz coordinate transformation falls directly out of Maxwell's equations—if, only if, you add that particular coordinate-invariance condition.