Book Title: Tulsi Prajna 1990 06
Author(s): Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

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Page 61
________________ Vol. XVI, No. 1 for the nul result of the experiment. The idea was not wholly fanciful or hypothetical, for Lorentz showed very shortly afterwards in his mathematical transformations that if a body moves with a velocity comparable to the velocity of light, it would experience a considerable contraction in length in the direction of the motion. 10 Lorentz, in his mathematical transformation, also showed that when a system moves, a contraction occurs in the time-dimension too. This not only explained, fully afid completely, why the MichelsonMorley experiment had failed, but it further showed that every material measuring rod would necessarily contract just sufficiently to conceal the earth's motion through the ether, so that all similar experiment were doomed to failure in advance. But other types of measuring rods are known to science ; beams of light, electric forces, and so on, can be made to span the distances from point to point, and so provide the means for moasuring distances. It was thought that where material measuring rods had failed, optical and electrical measuring rods might succeed. The trial was made, repeatedly and in many forms-the names of the late Lord Rayleigh, of Brace and of Trouton are eminent in this connection. And every time it failed. If the earth had a speed x through the ether, every apparatus that the wit of man could devise confused the measurement of x by adding a spurious speed exactly equal to--X, and so reitorating the apparent zero answer of the original Michelson-Morley experiment.11 Thus, the upshot of many years arduous experimenting was that the scientists failed to detect the earth's motion through the ether. Dr. Albert Einstein When no solution to the problem created by Michelson-Morley experiment was being found, it was Albert Einstein, a twenty-six year old young scientist who yielded a venerable solution which subsequently brought a revolution in the field of modern physics, In 1905. Einstein wrote his famous article on "The Theory of Relativity", in which he, on the basis of Lorentzs mathematical transformations, established altogether new facts. First of all, Einstein gave up the concept of ether as a physical substance, He, then, propounded the new law in the form, 'Nature is such that it is impossible to determine absolute motion of any uniformly moving systein by any experiment whatever." This is called as “Special Theory of Relativity". Thus, the special theory is limited to the description of events as they appear to observers in a state of uniform motion, relative to one another. Together with ether, Einstein also denied the existence of space in the form of an absolute stationary frame of reference, which pro. Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

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