Kraus

Professor Dr. 0. KRAUS /PRAG TO RELATIVITY THEORIE 1 )

The optical experiment employed by Michelson seemed to show that the light emitted by an earthly light source behaved exactly as if the earth was resting, and that the light source was ejecting the light like a projectile, as if a projectile theory such as the Newtons and Poissons; or if you consider a wave theory:

1 ) See v. 1, essay: Frankfurter Zeitung, No. 163, 3, III, 1927, from which the above text is taken. — 2. ‘Fiction and hypothesis in Einstein’s RTH’, Ann. d. Phil. II, 3, 1921 (special issue of Relativity). —-3, Kant Studies, XXV, 1, 1920 (21); “To the teaching of space and time,” Brentano said. — 4. Kant Studies, XXVI, 3 and 4, 1921 (22) , “The confusion of means of description and description in Einstein’s RTH.” — 5. Lotos, 70, 1922, p. 333 ff. — - 6. Review, XXV, 1921; “The impossibility of Einstein’s theory of movement”. - — 7. ‘Open letters to Einstein and Laue’. Braumüller, Vienna and Leipzig 1925.

as if the light ether is taken from the earth like the air in a ship’s cabin. Both assumptions, however, contradicted the prevailing electrodynamic theory of the aether at rest of H. A. Lorentz. According to this theory, our earth leaves on its journey through the unresisted world ether [where the ether is] completely at rest; Therefore, if Michelson in his famous experiment sent light waves back and forth in the direction of travel of the planet and in a different direction, then one had to follow Lorentz’s theory of the stationary ether and expect that the light waves have to cover a longer or shorter way and arrive later or earlier than they would arrive if the aether were carried away. So how can one explain that the Michelson experiment turned out to be as if the Lorentz theory were incorrect? It was a very daring hypothesis when Lorentz, instead of changing his theory, assumed that the Michelson apparatus, and every body in general, would change quantitatively when it moves, in such a way that the Michelson apparatus and every body in general converge in the direction of its movement ! Through this “contraction hypothesis” Lorentz succeeded in reconciling his theory with the results of the Michelson experiment that contradicted it. This hypothesis of Lorentz may be strange, but it is in any case an attempt to explain the so-called"negative result" of the Michelson experiment while maintaining the hypothesis of the stationary aether.

According to Einstein, however, “contraction is only a consequence of the point of view, not a change of a physical reality” (Born), which is clear with all evidence from the fact that the Einstein contraction took place only “for the non-moving observer”, so that it depends on the presence and the arbitrarily chosen positions of an observer, while the Lorentz contraction is intended as a process physically independent of any observation. According to Einstein, there is a very strange process: for the observer, everything remains unchanged on the same system; for him it is not true that any lengths of his body shorten as a result of movement, or that any of his clocks slow down. But the observer on the non-moving system measures the lengths of the other system as shorter, the times as longer. Eddington, the English proponent of Relativity, explicitly points out in his work translated by Teubner the fairytale nature of these reciprocal pseudo-measurement, which has nothing in common with the Lorentzian hypothesis of a real shortening from the mathematical formula. Here only so much is said that the Einstein’s principle of relativity “postulates” that in the measuring comparison of the speed of a light reproduction (c) with that of a straight uniform motion (v) of any other movable thing, there must always be a speed difference of 300000 km/sec in favour of light ; 18 in other words, the speed of light “plays the role of an infinite speed” that disappears from any other speed. The paradox that c -v = c should always result for the measuring comparison is sought by that reciprocal change in time scales (clocks) and continuing to make the spatial measures comprehensible 1 ). The change (shortening) of the spatial scales is quantitatively equal to Relativity, but — as stated above — in a different way from the Lorentz contraction, i.e. only for the observer on a non-moving system. Of course, these are not actual experiences, but “postulates” and by equating space and time measure (clock) with space and time in the further course, those overturning teachings about the relativity of “simultaneousness” and the lapse of everything that common sense, like that of Newton, Euler and Kant, considers to be a priori evident arises. However, Relativity’s criticism of Prof. Wiener in Leipzig, who “Never can we make the size of a speed disappear by choosing the scale alone, as is possible with the principle of relativity by choosing the inherent speed to be withdrawn.”"