A Living Work of Art

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians the Netherlands has ever known. Einstein called him “a living work of art, a perfect personality.” During his funeral in 1928, the entire Dutch nation mourned. The national telegraph service was suspended for three minutes and his passing was national and international front-page news. The cream of international science, an impressive list of dignitaries including the Prince Consort, and thousands of ordinary people turned out to see Lorentz being carried to his last resting place. This biography describes the life of Lorentz, from his early childhood as the son of a market gardener in the provincial town of Arnhem, to his death as a leading light in physics and international scientific cooperation and a trailblazer for Einstein’s relativity theory. A number of chapters shed light on his unique place in science, the importance of his ideas, his international conciliatory and scientific activities after World War One, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his important role as Einstein’s teacher and intellectual critic. By making use of recently discovered family correspondence, the author was able to show that there lies a true human being behind Lorentz’s façade of perfection. One chapter is devoted to Lorentz’s wife Aletta, a woman in her own right whose progressive feminist ideas were of considerable influence on those of her husband. Two separate chapters focus on his most important scientific achievements, in terms accessible to a general audience.

VERS UNE MEILLEURE COMPRÉHENSION DES PREMIÈRES IDÉES SCIENTIFIQUES D’ALBERT EINSTEIN – SON ENVIRONNEMENT SCIENTIFIQUE EN ITALIE (1895-1902)

L’«année miraculeuse» d’Einstein (1905), qui le voit publier en l’espace de quelques mois quatre articles et une thèse ayant marqué la physique de son temps, apparaît bien éloignée des années durant lesquelles, jeune étudiant à l’ETH de Zurich (1896-1900) puis en thèse (1901-1902), il revenait régulièrement dans sa famille à Milan. Albert Einstein s’étant très peu exprimé sur ses questionnements et ses positionnements scientifiques dans cette période, nous les analysons en détail à partir du contenu des lettres qu’il écrit à sa future femme Mileva Marić. Nous nous appuyons pour cela sur une étude antérieure portant sur son environnement scientifique à Milan publiée dans ces mêmes Rendiconti di Scienze. La lecture à la bibliothèque de l’Institut lombard du Festschrift pour Lorentz a joué un rôle important dans ses réflexions au printemps 1901, lorsqu’il est à Milan en compagnie de son ami Michele Besso. Nous discutons en particulier comment un article de Max Reinganum l’a mené sur une «fausse piste» le conduisant au retrait début 1902 d’une première thèse, dont celle de 1905 allait prendre le contrepied. Toujours dans le Festschrift, l’article de Henri Poincaré auquel Einstein fera référence en 1906, a de son côté probablement contribué à sa prise de conscience que le temps local introduit par Hendrik Antoon Lorentz est un vrai temps; il a pu aussi, chose surprenante, participer à une première image de quanta différente de celle de Max Planck. Quant au passage étonnant par la physique statistique (1902-1904), qui allait conduire Albert Einstein en 1904 avec Michele Besso à renouer avec les quanta, nous montrerons qu’il a été déterminé par une lecture passionnée mais incomplète de Ludwig Boltzmann (1899-1901). Finalement, la période antérieure à 1905, en partie à Milan, se révèle être une période riche scientifiquement, qui a permis au jeune étudiant Albert de devenir le savant Einstein que l’on connaît.

Showcasing Science

Teylers Museum was founded in 1784 and soon thereafter became one of the most important centres of Dutch science. The Museum’s first director, Martinus van Marum, famously had the world’s largest electrostatic generator built and set up in Haarlem. This subsequently became the most prominent item in the Museum’s world-class, publicly accessible, and constantly growing collections. These comprised scientific instruments, mineralogical and palaeontological specimens, prints, drawings, paintings, and coins. Van Marum’s successors continued to uphold the institution’s prestige and use the collections for research purposes, while it was increasingly perceived as an art museum by the public. In the early twentieth century, the Nobel Prize laureate Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was appointed head of the scientific instrument collection and conducted experiments on the Museum’s premises. Showcasing Science: A History of Teylers Museum in the Nineteenth Century charts the history of Teylers Museum from its inception until Lorentz’ tenure. From the vantage point of the Museum’s scientific instrument collection, this book gives an analysis of the changing public role of Teylers Museum over the course of the nineteenth century.

The case of the stolen rooms

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926) was famous for the Cryogenic Laboratory he built up at Leiden University. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928), Professor of theoretical physics at the same university and Onnes' closest colleague, left Leiden in 1912. According to Lorentz's daughter, this move had been initiated by a ‘trick’ Onnes had played on her father a few years earlier. Lorentz had been given two small laboratories for his personal use, but within a short time, according to Lorentz' daughter, Onnes just pinched those rooms and added them to his big laboratory. How did Kamerlingh Onnes and Lorentz get along together, and what really happened in the ‘case of the stolen rooms’?