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During the nineteenth century there were several speculative attempts to show that mass and energy were proportional in various discredited ether theories.[50] In particular, the writings of Samuel Tolver Preston His parents were Daniel Bloom Preston and Mary Susannah Tolver. Preston was educated as a Telegraph-engineer. He went to Munich where he attained his Ph.D in 1894 with Ludwig Boltzmann. After that, he worked as a teacher,[51][52] and a 1903 paper by Olinto De Pretto Olinto De Pretto was an Italian industrialist and physicist from Schio, Vicenza,[46][53] presented a mass–energy relation. De Pretto's paper received recent press coverage when Umberto Bartocci discovered that there were only three degrees of separation Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth. It was popularised by a play written by John Guare linking De Pretto to Einstein, leading Bartocci to conclude that Einstein was probably aware of De Pretto's work.[54][55]
Preston and De Pretto, following Le Sage Le Sage's theory of gravitation is the most common name for the kinetic theory of gravity originally proposed by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690 and later by Georges-Louis Le Sage in 1748. The theory proposed a mechanical explanation for Newton's gravitational force in terms of streams of tiny unseen particles impacting on all material objects, imagined that the universe was filled with an ether of tiny particles which are always moving at speed c. Each of these particles have a kinetic energy of mc2 up to a small numerical factor. The nonrelativistic kinetic energy formula did not always include the traditional factor of 1/2, since Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician who wrote primarily in Latin and French introduced kinetic energy without it, and the 1/2 is largely conventional in prerelativistic physics.[56] By assuming that every particle has a mass which is the sum of the masses of the ether particles, the authors would conclude that all matter contains an amount of kinetic energy either given by E = mc2 or 2E = mc2 depending on the convention. A particle ether was usually considered unacceptably speculative science at the time,[57] and since these authors didn't formulate relativity, their reasoning is completely different from that of Einstein, who used relativity to change frames.
Independently, Gustave Le Bon Gustave Le Bon was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behaviour and crowd psychology in 1905 speculated that atoms could release large amounts of latent energy, reasoning from an all-encompassing qualitative philosophy of physics.[58][59]
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