Abstract
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, in physics appeared some revolutionary discoveries: in 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845–1923) (Nobel Prize 1901) discovered the X-rays; in 1896 Henri Antoine Becquerel (1853–1908) discovered natural radioactivity; in 1897 Joseph John Thomson (1856–1940) (Nobel Prize 1906) discovered the electron; in 1900 Max Planck (1858–1947) (Nobel Prize 1918) postulated the idea that the energy emitted by a black body could only take on discrete values; in 1905 Albert Einstein (1879–1955) (Nobel Prize 1921) elaborated the special theory of relativity. These discoveries marked genuine turning points that shook classical physics and marked out the fundamental directions of further development of physics: quantum theory, theory of elementary particles, special and general theory of relativity, etc.
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Notes
- 1.
An event is “an occurrence that happens in a small space and lasts a short time” (J.L. Synge).
- 2.
On the 21st of September 1908, Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) began his talk at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians with the following introduction, which has become by now famous: “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
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Chaichian, M., Merches, I., Radu, D., Tureanu, A. (2016). Special Theory of Relativity. In: Electrodynamics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17381-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17381-3_6
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