Albert Gerard Gluckman
Albert Gerard Gluckman | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Studies of the Voigt transformation and critiques of the derivation of the Lorentz transformation |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, history of physics |
Albert Gerard Gluckman is a physicist and historian of physics known for his studies of Woldemar Voigt's coordinate transformations and their relationship to the Lorentz transformation of special relativity. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Work
Gluckman published "Coordinate Transformations of W. Voigt and the Principle of Special Relativity" in the American Journal of Physics (1968), examining the 1887 transformation proposed by Voigt in his study of the Doppler effect and comparing its kinematics to that of the Lorentz transformation. He argued that, unlike the Lorentz transformation, the Voigt transformation lacks group structure, and he analyzed the apparent kinematic asymmetry of the Voigt coordinate transformations as a form of conformally symmetric kinematics.
He later returned to these themes in the journal Physics Essays, with papers including "The missing lines of calculations in Einstein's derivation of the Lorentz transformation" and "A. Michelson's Ether Drift Experiments from the Viewpoint of Voigt Kinematics," in which he discussed how Voigt-based kinematical models can accommodate the failure to detect ether drift. This critical re-examination of the foundations of relativity is the basis for his inclusion among relativity critics.