Ludwik Silberstein (1872 – 1948) was a Polish-American physicist that helped make special relativity and general relativity staples of university coursework. Special relativity (SR (also known as the special theory of relativity or STR) is the Physical theory of Measurement in Inertial General relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of Gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916 His textbook The Theory of Relativity was published by Cambridge University Press in 1914 with a second edition, expanded to include general relativity, in 1924. Optics Book of Optics
Silberstein was born May 17, 1872 in Warsaw to Samuel Silberstein and Emily Steinkalk. He was educated in Cracow, Heidelberg, and Berlin. To teach he went to Bologna, Italy from 1899 to 1904, switching then to the University of Rome until 1920. That year he entered private research for the Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, New York. Eastman Kodak Company ( is an American multinational Public company which produces imaging and photographic materials and equipment Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York State, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. For nine years he maintained this consultancy with Kodak labs while he gave his relativity course on occasion at the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, and Cornell University. The University of Chicago is a Private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. This article is about the University of Toronto's St George Campus He lived until January 17, 1948.
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Textbook inaugurating relativity science
At the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1912 at Cambridge, Silberstein spoke on “Some applications of quaternions”. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM is the largest congress in the Mathematics community The text was not published in the proceedings of the congress, but rather was placed in the Philosophical Magazine of May, 1912, with the title “Quaternionic form of relativity”. The Philosophical Magazine is arguably the world’s oldest commercially published Scientific journal. The following year Cambridge University Press published the textbook linked above. Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP is a Publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534 The quaternions used are actually biquaternions. The biquaternions are the numbers w + xi + yj + zk \ \! where w x y and z are complex numbers and the elements of {1 i j k} multiply as in the Quaternion group The book is highly readable and well-referenced with contemporary sources in the footnotes.
Other contributions
According to Martin Claussen, Ludwik Silberstein initiated a line of thought involving eddy currents in the atmosphere, or fluids generally. He says that Silberstein anticipated foundational work by Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862 – 1951). Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes ( March 14, 1862 - April 9, 1951) was a Norwegian Physicist and Meteorologist
Other works
- Vectorial Mechanics 1913, 1926
- Simplified Method of Tracing Rays Through Lenses 1918
- Projective Vector Algebra 1919
- Elements of the Electromagnetic Theory of Light 1918
- Elements of Vector Algebra 1919
- Theory of General Relativity and Gravitation 1922
- The Size of the Universe 1930
- Causality 1933
References
- Martin Claussen, Bericht uber die 4. FAGEM Tagung, S. 16 .
- Ludwik Silberstein, Quaternionic form of relativity, Philosophical Magazine 23:790-809.
- Allen G. Debus, “Ludwik Silberstein”, Who’s Who in Science, 1968. Allen George Debus (born August 16 1926 in Chicago is an American historian of science known primarily for his work in the history of chemistry and alchemy
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