Ludwik Silberstein

Ludwik Silberstein (1872 – 1948) was a Polish-American physicist that helped make special relativity and general relativity staples of university coursework. 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.

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. 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.He lived until January 17, 1948.

Textbook inaugurating relativity science

At the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1912 at Cambridge, Silberstein spoke on “Some applications of quaternions”. 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 following year Cambridge University Press published the textbook linked above. The quaternions used are actually biquaternions. 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).

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.