Talk:Herbert E. Ives

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[edit] Opposition to Einstein's philosophy, not to SRT

According to the text Ives was "opposed the Einstein's theory of relativity". That is somewhat misleading, as I will try to make clear with the following situation sketch.

Ives actually (as pointed out) set out to demonstrate the correctness of Special relativity, although he uinterpreted it according to the school of Lorentz. Many physicists did not (and some still do not) distinguish between philosphy and experimental physics, while probably most modern readers will understand "Einstein's theory of relativity" to point to his physics and not to his philosophy. However, as also mentioned in the introduction to the cited book, Ives fully agreed with SRT's predictions. On top of that, I remember (but I must also source it) that Ives explained in one paper (probably a later one) that he agreed with the laws of SRT but that he interpreted SRT differently from Einstein.

-> Thus for starters, a more precise citation of the above claim is needed (which paper of Ives, of which year). Harald88 22:29, 16 November 2006 (UTC

Here's a primer that sketches very well his real stand: In "Derivation of the Lorentz transformations" (Phil. Mag. 7, vol.39, 1945 p.392) he writes:

The indeterminancies and impotences by which the "Restricted Theory of Relativity" has been widely publicized [...] all follow as consequences of our resolution of the apparent conflict between the laws of the conservation of energy and momentum on the one hand and the laws of light propagation on the other, our resultion being in favour of the conservation laws. [...] The fact that the Lorentz transformations with all their consequences are deducible from these classes the "Special Principle of Relativity" as a superfluous hypothesis.

"Indeterminancy and impotence of publicizing" and "Superfluous" do not match the above claim of "opposed to".

Thus if the claim is not corroberated I'll replace it with a claim that matches his above clarifications. Harald88 22:40, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Please do fix it. I had added the original statement without researching the background sufficiently. Dicklyon 22:45, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The current article, and the above comments, don't reflect Ives's repeated claims to have disproven various aspects of Einstein's special relativity. For example, in his 1949 paper "Lorentz Type Transformations..." Ives argued that Einstein's definition of simultaneity was both "not legitimate" and "not true", and he claimed to have proven this experimentally in his 1948 paper "The Measurement of the Velocity of Light...". He also developed what he regarded as the correct alternatives to the Lorentz transformations, which were highly complex expressions based on a new-Lorentzian approach. Now, it is true that, when properly interpreted, his equations are equivalent to the usual (much simpler) ones, but two important points need to be made about this: (1) Ives himself denied the equivalence, and insisted that the usual equations were "wrong", and (2) Ives's equations involve the actual speeds relative to the ether, which by Ives's own account are unknowable, so the equations are strictly worthless, unless we make explicit use of the assumption that they give the same answers regardless of what frame of reference we choose. In other words, his equations are useless unless one assumes special relativity AND one accepts that Ives's equations are empirically equivalent to those of special relativity. Ives explicitly denied both of those premises.

So, I think it's fair to say that the current article is smushing over the real story. Also, the article could use a lot more biographical info. I have found a whole biography of him that contains good information for this article, including a appraisal of his views on relativity by H. D. Robertson. If no one objects, I'll try to fit some of this into the article. It would also be good to show how Ives's work on television fit into the overall development of what became the practical television systems of today. Lumpy27 02:48, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Please go ahead and add such information, with proper accredition. In paticular his pioneering work on TV should be elaborated on. Harald88 10:35, 11 November 2007 (UTC)