Abstract
Maxwell’s electromagnetism equations and the old notions of Newtonian absolute time and Euclidian absolute space were contradictory with the impossibility of detection of the Earth’s absolute motion.
Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz exchanged many friendly letters on these subjects over more than ten years. They improved their analysis step by step and this situation led Henri
Poincaré to consider that the notions of absolute time and space as well as the corresponding “ether” are artificial and do not really exist. The modifications of inertial reference frames do not follow the Galilean rules but those of the Lorentz transformation that can be deduced from Poincaré ’s relativity principle presented in 1904 at the world scientific congress of Saint Louis (Missouri).
Poincaré’ s later works of June and July 1905 have led to the full developmentof Special Relativity with its links to electromagnetism and the first mention of gravitational waves.
Unfortunately Henri Poincaré did not survive much to his gigantic pioneering work, he got cancer in 1909 and died in 1912.
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Marchal, C. (1997). Henri Poincaré: A Decisive Contribution to Special Relativity. In: Dvorak, R., Henrard, J. (eds) The Dynamical Behaviour of our Planetary System. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5510-6_30
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