Alfred Arthur Robb FRS (18 January 1873 in

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdo ...

– 14 December 1936 in Castlereagh) was a

Northern Irish Northern Irish people is a demonym for all people born in Northern Ireland or people who are entitled to reside in Northern Ireland without any restriction on their period of residence. Most Northern Irish people either identify as Northern ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

Biography

Robb studied at

Queen's College, Belfast , mottoeng = For so much, what shall we give back? , top_free_label = , top_free = , top_free_label1 = , top_free1 = , top_free_label2 = , top_free2 = , established = , closed = , type = Public research university , parent = ...

(BA 1894) and at St John's College, Cambridge (Tripos 1897, MA 1901). He then proceeded to

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...

, where, guided by

Woldemar Voigt Woldemar Voigt (; 2 September 1850 – 13 December 1919) was a German physicist, who taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen. Voigt eventually went on to head the Mathematical Physics Department at Göttingen and was succeeded in ...

, he wrote his dissertation on the

Zeeman effect The Zeeman effect (; ) is the effect of splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of a static magnetic field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman, who discovered it in 1896 and received a Nobel priz ...

. He also worked under

J. J. Thomson Sir Joseph John Thomson (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was a British physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, credited with the discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be discovered. In 1897, Thomson showed that ...

at the Cavendish Laboratory. The Croix de Guerre was awarded to him for WWI service in the

Red Cross The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a Humanitarianism, humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million Volunteering, volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure re ...

, and in 1921 he became a fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

. He is known for his four books on

special relativity In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory regarding the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein's original treatment, the theory is based on two postulates: # The laws o ...

(1911, 1914, 1921, 1936) where he gave a

spacetime In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize relativistic effects, such as why differ ...

derivation of the theory in an axiomatic-geometric way. Robb therefore was sometimes called the "Euclid of relativity". In the first of these works he used a

hyperbolic angle In geometry, hyperbolic angle is a real number determined by the area of the corresponding hyperbolic sector of ''xy'' = 1 in Quadrant I of the Cartesian plane. The hyperbolic angle parametrises the unit hyperbola, which has hyperbolic function ...

ω to introduce the concept of rapidityRobb (1911) ''Optical Geometry of Motion'' and showed that the kinematic space of velocities is

hyperbolic Hyperbolic is an adjective describing something that resembles or pertains to a hyperbola (a curve), to hyperbole (an overstatement or exaggeration), or to hyperbolic geometry. The following phenomena are described as ''hyperbolic'' because they ...

, so that "instead of a Euclidean triangle of velocities, we get a Lobachevski triangle of rapidities". However, contrary to the scientific mainstream, he believed that the works of

Joseph Larmor Sir Joseph Larmor (11 July 1857 – 19 May 1942) was an Irish and British physicist and mathematician who made breakthroughs in the understanding of electricity, dynamics, thermodynamics, and the electron theory of matter. His most influent ...

and Hendrik Lorentz were more important for relativity than the works of

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

and Hermann Minkowski.Sanchez-Ron, pp. 46-49

Books

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robb, Alfred 1873 births 1936 deaths Scientists from Belfast Physicists from Northern Ireland Fellows of the Royal Society Irish relativity theorists