George Frederick Charles Searle
Encyclopedia
George Frederick Charles Searle (3 December 1864 – 16 November 1954) was a British physicist and teacher, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
, Cambridgeshire
, England
.
As a child, he knew Clerk Maxwell, whom he considered to be a humorous individual. In 1888 he began work at the Cavendish Laboratory
under J.J. Thomson, and ended up working with the lab for 55 years. After World War II, he ran the undergraduate labs. His equipment, used to calibrate the Ohm, with Thompson about 1900, was still being used in the undergraduate lab.
. This was a direct predecessor of Einstein's theory of special relativity, when several people were investigating the change of mass with velocity. Following the work of Oliver Heaviside
, he defined the expression Heaviside ellipsoid, which means that the electrostatic field is contracted
in the line of motion. Those developments, when modified, were ultimately important for the development of special relativity
.
Biography
Searle was born in OakingtonOakington
Oakington is a small village 4 miles north-west of Cambridge in Cambridgeshire in England, and belongs to the administrative district of South Cambridgeshire. The village falls into the parish of Oakington and Westwick.-History:...
, Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire is a county in England, bordering Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the northeast, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfordshire to the south, and Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire to the west...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
.
As a child, he knew Clerk Maxwell, whom he considered to be a humorous individual. In 1888 he began work at the Cavendish Laboratory
Cavendish Laboratory
The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in 1874 as a teaching laboratory....
under J.J. Thomson, and ended up working with the lab for 55 years. After World War II, he ran the undergraduate labs. His equipment, used to calibrate the Ohm, with Thompson about 1900, was still being used in the undergraduate lab.
Contributions to science
He is known for his work on the velocity dependence of the electromagnetic massElectromagnetic mass
Electromagnetic mass was initially a concept of classical mechanics, denoting as to how much the electromagnetic field, or the self-energy, is contributing to the mass of charged particles. It was first derived by J. J. Thomson in 1881 and was for some time also considered as a dynamical...
. This was a direct predecessor of Einstein's theory of special relativity, when several people were investigating the change of mass with velocity. Following the work of Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques to the solution of differential equations , reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and...
, he defined the expression Heaviside ellipsoid, which means that the electrostatic field is contracted
Length contraction
In physics, length contraction – according to Hendrik Lorentz – is the physical phenomenon of a decrease in length detected by an observer of objects that travel at any non-zero velocity relative to that observer...
in the line of motion. Those developments, when modified, were ultimately important for the development of special relativity
Special relativity
Special relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...
.