Everything about Joseph Larmor totally explained
Sir
Joseph Larmor (
11 July 1857 Magheragall,
County Antrim,
Northern Ireland –
19 May 1942 Holywood,
County Down,
Northern Ireland ), a
physicist and
mathematician who made innovations in the understanding of
electricity,
dynamics,
thermodynamics, and the electron theory of matter. His most influential work was
Aether and Matter, a theoretical physics book published in 1900.
Biography
He grew up in
Belfast, the son of a shopkeeper. He was a student at
Royal Belfast Academical Institution, then
Queen's University Belfast, then
University of Cambridge. After teaching natural philosophy (physics) for a few years at
Queen's College, Galway, Ireland, in 1885 he accepted a lectureship in mathematics at
St John's College, Cambridge. In 1903 he was appointed
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post he retained until his retirement in 1932. He never married.
Larmor proposed that the
aether could be represented as a
homogeneous fluid medium which was perfectly in
compressible and
elastic. Larmor believed the aether was separate from matter. He united
Lord Kelvin's model of spinning
gyrostats (for example,
vortexes) with this
theory.
Parallel to the development of
Lorentz ether theory, Larmor published the complete
Lorentz transformations in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1897 some two years before
Hendrik Lorentz (1899, 1904) and eight years before
Albert Einstein (1905). Larmor predicted the
phenomenon of
time dilation, at least for orbiting electrons, and verified that the
FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction (
length contraction) should occur for bodies whose atoms were held together by electromagnetic forces. In his book
Aether and Matter (1900), he again presented the Lorentz transformations, time dilation and length contraction (treating these as dynamic rather than
kinematic effects). Larmor opposed
Albert Einstein's
theory of relativity (though he supported it for a short time). Larmor rejected both the
curvature of space and the special theory of relativity, to the extent that he claimed that an absolute time was essential to astronomy (Larmor 1924, 1927).
Larmor held that
matter consisted of
particles moving in the aether. Larmor believed the source of
electric charge was a "
particle" (which as early as 1894 he was referring to as the
electron). Thus, in what was apparently the first specific prediction of
time dilation, he wrote "... individual electrons describe corresponding parts of their orbits in times shorter for the [rest] system in the ratio (1 - v
2/c
2)
1/2" (Larmor 1897).
Larmor held that the flow of charged particles constitutes the
current of
conduction (but wasn't part of the
atom). Larmor calculated the rate of
energy radiation from an
accelerating electron. Larmor explained the splitting of the
spectral lines in a
magnetic field by the
oscillation of electrons.
In
1919, Larmor proposed
sunspots are
self-regenerative dynamo action on the
Sun's surface.
Motivated by his strong opposition to
Home Rule for Ireland, in February 1911 Larmor ran for and was elected as Member of Parliament for
Cambridge University (UK Parliament constituency) with the
Liberal Unionist party. He remained in parliament until the
1922 general election, at which point the Irish question had been settled. Upon his retirement from Cambridge in 1932 Larmor moved back to
County Down in
Northern Ireland.
Selected Publications
- 1887, "On the direct applications of first principles in the theory of partial differential equations," Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- 1891, "On the theory of electrodynamics," Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- 1892, "On the theory of electrodynamics, as affected by the nature of the mechanical stresses in excited dielectrics," Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- 1893-97, "Dynamical Theory of the Electric and Luminiferous Medium," Proceedings of the Royal Society; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Series of 3 papers containing Larmor's physical theory of the universe.
- 1894, "Least action as the fundamental formulation in dynamics and physics," Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.
- 1896, "The influence of a magnetic field on radiation frequency," Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- 1896, "On the absolute minimum of optical deviation by a prism," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
- ; Containing the Lorentz transformations on p. 229.
- 1898, "Note on the complete scheme of electrodynamic equations of a moving material medium, and electrostriction," Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- 1898, "On the origin of magneto-optic rotation," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
- ; Containing the Lorentz transformations on p. 174.
- 1903, "On the electrodynamic and thermal relations of energy of magnetisation," Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- 1907, "Aether" in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. London.
- 1908, "William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs. 1824-1907" (Obituary). Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- 1924, "On Editing Newton," Nature.
- 1927, "Newtonian time essential to astronomy," Nature.
- 1929, "Mathematical and Physical Papers. Cambridge Univ. Press.
Larmor edited the collected works of George Stokes and William Thomson.
Further Information
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