Alfred Arthur Robb
FRS (18 January 1873 in
Belfast
Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingd ...
– 14 December 1936 in
Castlereagh) was a
Northern Irish physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate ca ...
.
Biography
Robb studied at
Queen's College, Belfast
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(BA 1894) and at
St John's College, Cambridge (Tripos 1897, MA 1901). He then proceeded to
University of Göttingen, where, guided by
Woldemar Voigt, he wrote his dissertation on the
Zeeman effect. He also worked under
J. J. Thomson at the
Cavendish Laboratory. The
Croix de Guerre was awarded to him for WWI service in the
Red Cross
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a Humanitarianism, humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million Volunteering, volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure re ...
, and in 1921 he became a fellow of the
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, r ...
.
He is known for his four books on
special relativity
In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory regarding the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein's original treatment, the theory is based on two postulates:
# The law ...
(1911, 1914, 1921, 1936) where he gave a
spacetime
In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize relativistic effects, such as why diffe ...
derivation of the theory in an axiomatic-geometric way. Robb therefore was sometimes called the "Euclid of relativity". In the first of these works he used a
hyperbolic angle ω to introduce the concept of
rapidity[Robb (1911) ''Optical Geometry of Motion''] and showed that the kinematic space of velocities is
hyperbolic, so that "instead of a Euclidean triangle of velocities, we get a Lobachevski triangle of rapidities".
[
However, contrary to the scientific mainstream, he believed that the works of Joseph Larmor and Hendrik Lorentz were more important for relativity than the works of ]Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theor ...
and Hermann Minkowski
Hermann Minkowski (; ; 22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich and Göttingen. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and used geometrical methods to solve problems in numb ...
.[Sanchez-Ron, pp. 46-49]
Books
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Robb, Alfred
1873 births
1936 deaths
Scientists from Belfast
Physicists from Northern Ireland
Fellows of the Royal Society
Irish relativity theorists