Hendrik Antoon Lorentz: biography and contributions of this Dutch physicist.

A summary of the life of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, a very influential Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz is one of the most important scientists in the recent history of the Netherlands, with findings that have contributed to physics as we know it today and influenced illustrious figures such as Albert Einstein and Ernest Rutherford.

Very much given to both science and languages, Lorentz contributed to the scientific scene of his time by publishing several works on his scientific findings not only in his native Dutch, but also in French, German and English.

Described as multifaceted, kind and charismatic by his contemporaries, Lorentz has gone down in history as the man who gave force to the idea that electromagnetism and light were related to negatively charged subatomic particles, the electrons. Today we will discover what his life was through this biography of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz this biography of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in abridged format.

Short biography of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1902. Lorentz's discoveries constituted an immense step in the development of electromagnetic theory, and which gave a theoretical and practical push to several of the important discoveries of the last century, among them Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

His childhood

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was born on July 18, 1853 in Arnhem, the Netherlands.. His parents were Gerrit Frederik Lorentz, a wealthy horticulturist, and Geertruida van Ginkel, who died when Lorentz was only four years old. After the death of his wife, Gerrit Lorentz remarried Luberta Hupkes.

As a young boy Hendrik Antoon attended two of the three daily shifts at the local school. When in 1866 the first high school opened in his home town, young Lorentz was already ready to begin the third grade. He was an outstanding studentHe was an outstanding student, with spectacular results not only in the sciences such as mathematics and physics, but also in French, German and English.

University education and academic life

At the end of the fifth and final year of high school, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz studied classical languages, which was required at the time for university studies. He enrolled at the University of Leiden in 1870 and, just one year later, obtained a degree in mathematics and physics.. In 1872 he returned to his native Arnhem to teach mathematics in the afternoon at the local high school.

At this time he was preparing his doctoral thesis on the reflection and refraction of light, entitled in Dutch "Over de theorie der terugkaatsing en breking van het licht". In this thesis he explained with great clarity a concept that had not yet been translated into Dutch, and also dared to perfect in this way the electromagnetic theory proposed by James C. Maxwell. He defended his thesis in 1875, obtaining his doctorate when he was only 22 years old.

In 1878 he was appointed professor at the University of Leiden, taking charge of the new department of theoretical physics of the institution.. In his inaugural lecture he spoke about molecular theories in physics, an important text for the history of Dutch physics entitled "De moleculaire theoriën in de natuurkunde" (Molecular theories in physics).

In 1880, Henrik Lorentz established the relationship between the polarization of a molecule and the refractive index of a substance composed of molecules with this polarization. He made this finding in the same way as the Danish physicist Ludwig Valentin Lorenz, working independently. For this reason this relationship is known as the Lorenz-Lorentz formula.

In 1881 Lorentz was admitted as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the same year he married Aletta Catharina Kaiserdaughter of J. W. Kaiser, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, who would become the director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Kaiser was an illustrious character, who would become the designer of the first postage stamps of Holland.

Electromagnetic theory

During the first twenty years living in Leiden, Henrik Antoon Lorentz dedicated them to study the electromagnetic theory of electricity, magnetism and light. After some time he eventually extended his research to a variety of topics, including hydrodynamics and general relativity. His major contributions were to electromagnetism, electron theory and relativity..

By this time, Lorentz's intention was to develop a single theory that would explain the relationship between electricity, magnetism and light. For this reason, in 1892 he published "La théorie électromagnétique de Maxwell et son application aux corps mouvants" which, as its title indicates, was based on Maxwell's studies and stated that the phenomena of electricity are due to the movements of elementary electric particles, the electrons, a term originally created by George Johnstone Stoney.

At that time it was known that electromagnetic radiation was produced by the oscillation of electric charges, but the charges that generated the light were still unknown. It was taken for granted that an electric current was made up of charged particles, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz deduced that the atoms of matter must be charged particles and predicted, in 1892, that the oscillations of these particles must be the source of light..

Lorentz proposed that, if instead of using Galileo's transformations, other transformations were used, Maxwell's equations for the propagation of light would be invariant, so that the ether should not be used as a reference system. His proposal, which would eventually be called the Lorentz transformations, related the coordinates of space and time, allowing to describe electromagnetic phenomena when they pass from a fixed system to another with constant velocity..

With this, it not only explained the perceived absence of relative motion of the Earth with respect to the ether, as indicated by the experiments of Albert Abraham Michelson and Edward Morley, but also served for Albert Einstein to later propose the theory of relativity.

The Lorentz transformations are so important to physics because they made the equations of the made the equations of mechanics variable, which up to that time seemed even absurd.. These formulas describe the increase of mass, the shortening of length and the dilation of time that are characteristic of a moving object. These ideas laid the foundations for Einstein's special theory and, in fact, there are those who consider that the precursor of this theory was Hendrik Antoon Lorentz.

Discovery of the Zeeman effect and Nobel Prize

During the 1880s, Lorentz commissioned his student and personal assistant Pieter Zeeman to investigate whether a strong magnetic field could affect the oscillations and wavelengths of light. What Zeeman observed in 1986 was that the sodium D-lines of a flame decayed under a strong magnetic field, which led him to formulate what is known today as the Zeeman effect. It postulates that if a light source is subjected to a magnetic field, spectral lines of different wavelengths are decomposed into more components, with slightly different frequencies.

With this discovery, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1902.. They were recognized for their great work on the influence of magnetism on radiation phenomena, a contribution that would be crucial for the physics of the early twentieth century, so much so that it would serve Einstein to further elaborate his Theory of Relativity and formulate it as we know it today.

In 1907, while in Leipzig, Germany, he published several memoirs under the title "Abhandlungen über theoretische Physik" (Treatises on Theoretical Physics). In 1909 he published his book "Theory of electrons". Between 1919 and 1920 he published five volumes in which he collected his lectures in theoretical physics at the University of Leiden.

Last years and death

In 1908, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was awarded the Rumford Medal and the Copley Medalawarded by the Royal Society of London in honor of his scientific work and outstanding achievements in physics. In 1912, Lorentz was appointed director of research at the Teyler Institute in Haarlem and secretary of the Dutch Science Society. Despite his new positions, he continued to work as an honorary professor at the University of Leiden, teaching a class every Monday morning.

In 1919 Lorentz was appointed chairman of the committee for the study of seawater movements to be organized during and after the reclamation of the Zuiderzee dike, one of the greatest hydraulic engineering works of all time. His theoretical calculations, which were the result of eight years of arduous research, were confirmed in practice and have since become a classic in the field. and have since become a classic in the science of hydraulics.

Despite receiving numerous offers of professorships abroad, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz preferred to stay in his native Holland, working at the University of Leiden until his retirement in 1923. He would continue as professor emeritus of the institution until his death.

In 1923 Lorentz was elected as a member of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, a body of the League of Nations (the pre-World War II UN). This committee consisted exclusively of the most illustrious and gifted scholars. Lorentz became its chairman in 1925. In addition, he was chairman of all the Solvay Congresses, conferences where the most eminent scientists of the time gathered.

In January 1928, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz became seriously ill and died on February 4 of the same year in Haarlem, at the age of 74.On February 10, the funeral was held, presided over by Sir Ernest Rutherford on behalf of the Royal Society. At the stroke of the last bell indicating 12 noon, all telegraph and telephone services in the Netherlands stopped for three minutes as a tribute to the greatest Dutch citizen of the time.