Talk:Louis Essen

what embarrassment?

"caused some embarrassment to his employers" -

1. according to what source, and

2. according to that source, what did these employers claim to be embarrassing about such a criticism? Harald88 10:10, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Refusal to take account of Lorent factor in clock synchronization

The British physicist Louis Essen, a critic of special relativity, who had been responsible over decades for the British Standard of Time, had been known among his international collegues, e.g., at Germany's Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig/Berlin, for his refusal to take account for the Lorentz time dilatation factor in clock synchronization. In connection with the GPS it has meanwhile turned out, however, that the Lorentz factor needs to be accounted for.

Therefore, had Essen's critical attitude toward special relativity not been justified?

Essens criticism concerned the concept of 'time dilatation' as such, which he considered as irrational. He had not questioned the physical predictions deducible from the Lorentz transformation but he merely was not satisfied with the interpretations which had been attributed with these formulae. Recently, it has been shown by W. Krause, "Temptative Galilean Synthesis of the Optical Doppler Effect", Existentia XV, 127-139 (2005), that 'time dilatation' does not exist in reality, but is a misinterpretation of a real physical effect occuring when any transverse wave (electromagnetic waves such as light waves and radio waves are transverse waves) is observed from a moving platform. Let the angular (radian) frequency of the transverse wave be given by

$\omega _{o}={\frac {2\pi c}{\lambda }}$

where c is the vacuum speed of light and $\lambda$ is the wavelength. Then independently on his direction of motion, a moving observer has always the impression that the wave's angular frequency is samller than $\omega _{o}$.

The latter phenomenon is a direct consequence of the transversality of the wave. A transverse wave makes it necessary to pick up the Doppler signal in the transverse plane, i.e., in the direction perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the wave. Because of this circumstance the phase relations involved are more entangled than in the case of a Doppler signal picked up from a longitudinal wave, where the Doppler shifted angular frequency can simply be computed from the proportionality relation

${\frac {\omega '}{\omega _{o}}}={\frac {c'}{c}}$

Here c' is the relative phase velocity.

In the case of a transverse wave the vector character of angular velocity $\omega$ has in addition to be taken into account. This makes it necessary to employ the more sophisticated proportinality relation

${\frac {\omega '}{\omega _{o}}}={\frac {\omega '_{l}}{\omega '_{t}}}$

where

$\omega '_{l}={\frac {2\pi c'}{\lambda }}$

is the expression familar from the Doppler theory of longitudinal waves, and $\omega '_{t}$ corresponds to the Galilean transformation of the transversly rotating phase and has to be computed with the help of vector calculus.

In general a transverse wave is elliptically polarized. Depending on the sense of polarization, $\omega _{o}$ can then be represented by a vector ${\vec {\omega _{o}}}$ which is aligned either parallel or antiparallel to the direction of propagation.

It is known from vector calculus that the vector of angular velocity and the corresponding vector of linear velocity are mutually orthogonal. To the observer's motion with velovity v along the axis of propagation there should therefore correspond a vector ${\vec {\omega _{v}}}$ of length

$\omega _{v}={\frac {2\pi v}{\lambda }}$

which is aligned perpendicularly with respect of the axis of propagation and which has to be subtracted vectorially from ${\vec {\omega _{o}}}$, so as to find the effective angular frequency

$\omega '_{t}={\sqrt {\omega _{o}^{2}-\omega _{v}^{2}}}$

of the transverse wave.

For motion of the observer's platform with velocvity v along the axis of propagation this yields

${\frac {\omega '}{\omega _{o}}}={\frac {\omega '_{l}}{\omega '_{t}}}={\frac {c-v}{\sqrt {c^{2}-v^{2}}}}$

an expression identical with the corresponding formula for the so-called 'relativistic' Doppler effect.