History and Philosophy of Physics

    

A Wrong Argument in a Seminal Physics Paper

Authors: Antonio Leon

This article examines a wrong argument in a seminal physics paper published 114 years ago: Einstein's paper on the electrodynamics of moving objects. Although the argument in question is not determinant for the main conclusions of the paper (thanks to the prevalence of Lorentz transformation also deduced in the same paper), it contains several basic and significant errors that have remained undetected to this day. Those errors are consequences of a misinterpretation of the Principle of Relativity, surprisingly the same misinterpretation one can find in some naif critiques of special relativity. Considering the relevance of the paper and of its author, and the importance of the errors, there is no alternative but to make them public.

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[v1] 2020-10-18 11:37:52

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