Introduction

Abstract

The history of the central problem of this work, i.e. pulse propagation in linear dispersive media, goes back to Lord Rayleigh’s book (1894) and even earlier. We abandon here any attempt to present a comprehensive historical survey but outline a few events closely connected with our subject. In 1907 Arnold Sommerfeld presented a talk ‘Ein Einwand gegen die Relativtheorie der Elektrodynamik und seine Beseitigung’ (‘An objection against Relativity Theory from the standpoint of Electrodynamics and its elimination’) at a conference in Dresden. At that time many prominent physicists were intrigued by an apparent contradiction between the concept of group velocity and the special theory of relativity. The case of interest concerns light propagation in media with the effect of anomalous dispersion.