page_title: Hendrik Lorentz
section_title: Assessments
hierarchical_section_title: Hendrik Lorentz / Biography / Career / Assessments
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Lorentz-monument Park sonsbeek Arnhem Nederland, Netherlands Hendrik Antoon Lorentz Ludwig Oswald Wenckebach.
context_page_description: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He also derived the transformation equations underpinning Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.
  According to the biography published by the Nobel Foundation, "It may well be said that Lorentz was regarded by all theoretical physicists as the world's leading spirit, who completed what was left unfinished by his predecessors and prepared the ground for the fruitful reception of the new ideas based on the quantum theory." He received many honours and distinctions, including a term as chairman of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the forerunner of UNESCO, between 1925 and 1928.
context_section_description: Einstein wrote of Lorentz:
  1928: The enormous significance of his work consisted therein, that it forms the basis for the theory of atoms and for the general and special theories of relativity. The special theory was a more detailed expose of those concepts which are found in Lorentz's research of 1895.
   1953: For me personally he meant more than all the others I have met on my life's journey.
  Poincaré (1902) said of Lorentz's theory of electrodynamics:
  The most satisfactory theory is that of Lorentz; it is unquestionably the theory that best explains the known facts, the one that throws into relief the greatest number of known relations. It is due to Lorentz that the results of Fizeau on the optics of moving bodies, the laws of normal and abnormal dispersion and of absorption are connected with each other. Look at the ease with which the new Zeeman phenomenon found its place, and even aided the classification of Faraday's magnetic rotation, which had defied all Maxwell's efforts.
  Paul Langevin (1911) said of Lorentz:
  It will be Lorentz's main claim to fame that he demonstrated that the fundamental equations of electromagnetism also allow of a group of transformations that enables them to resume the same form when a transition is made from one reference system to another. This group differs fundamentally from the above group as regards transformations of space and time.''
  Lorentz and Emil Wiechert had an interesting correspondence on the topics of electromagnetism and the theory of relativity, and Lorentz explained his ideas in letters to Wiechert.
  Lorentz was chairman of the first Solvay Conference held in Brussels in the autumn of 1911. Shortly after the conference, Poincaré wrote an essay on quantum physics which gives an indication of Lorentz's status at the time:
  At every moment the twenty physicists from different countries could be heard talking of the [quantum mechanics] which they contrasted with the old mechanics. Now what was the old mechanics? Was it that of Newton, the one which still reigned uncontested at the close of the nineteenth century? No, it was the mechanics of Lorentz, the one dealing with the principle of relativity; the one which, hardly five years ago, seemed to be the height of boldness.
caption: Lorentz-monument Park Sonsbeek in Arnhem, the Netherlands
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