As Maxwells equation contained no direct reference to the motion of th — The Mathematician in Modern Physics

"Hydrodynamics... profited and such beautiful researches as those of the Bjerknes (1863 et. seq.) father and son, were stimulated in proportion as they fitted into the electromagnetic scheme."

"The real interpretative advance came from Lorentz, in 1892. Although he fully realized and had endeavored to explain away the Michelson difficulties, Lorentz none the less boldly put his coordinates in an absolutely fixed ether, penetrating all bodies, even the atoms. He then went back to the methods of Weber, but with this essential difference that he included the whole dictum of the Maxwellian electro-magnetics in his postulates."

"Following the suggestion of Lorentz that the moving system contracts in the direction of motion, or at least apparently contracts to the fixed witness, Einstein in 1905 was the first to clearly perceive the iron logic of the situation; and the logic of a desperate situation is all there is in the theory of relativity."

"The new bodies, showing an inertia or virtual mass depending in a pronounced way on their speed, made havoc with Newtons laws and swept the classic dynamics mercilessly out of the field, as an arbiter of world phenomena."

"Maxwell indeed, following the established custom, endeavored to call dynamics to his aid; but... mechanics had no counsel to give."

"While mathematics is easily able to cope with the problems of relativity, even in their most generalized aspects, since they never break with continuity, the questions are more menacing in the second class of the recent demands of experimental physics, which came to a crisis in certain straightforward experiments on radiation made at the Reichsanstalt (Lummer and Pringshen, 1899; Christianson, 1884) The question dates back to Kirchoffs (1859) in which emission and absorption are equal. Some time after came Stefans universal law of black body radiation (1879) and the theoretical verification on the part of Boltzmann in 1884."