Page:Deux Mémoires de Henri Poincaré.djvu/1



by H. A. Lorentz

The following pages cannot at all give a complete idea of what theoretical physics owes to Poincaré. I would have been happy to pay homage to his memory by presenting to the reader such a general picture, but I moved back in front of this task, that cannot be done with dignity without long and serious studies for which there was no time for me. I limited thus myself to two papers, that on the Dynamics of the electron, written in 1905 and published the following year in Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo, and the study on the quantum theory which appeared in the Journal de Physique at the beginning of 1912.

To fully appreciate the first of this works, I will have to enter in some details on the ideas whose development led to the principle of relativity. Thus let us speak a little about the part that I contributed to this development, I must say first that I have found a valuable encouragement in the benevolent interest that Poincaré constantly took with my studies. Moreover, we will see soon by which degree he surpassed me.

It is known that Fresnel had based the explanation of the astronomical aberration on the assumption of a motionless ether that the celestial bodies would cross without entraining it. We also know his famous theorem, a necessary complement of this fundamental assumption, of the partial entrainment of light waves by moving matter. An transparent body animated by translation will communicate to the rays only a fraction of its own speed, a fraction which