George Frederick Charles Searle FRS (3 December 1864 – 16 December 1954) was a British physicist and teacher. He also raced competitively as a cyclist while at the University of Cambridge.

Biography

Searle was born in

Oakington Oakington is a small rural Anglo-Saxon village north-west of Cambridge in Cambridgeshire in England, and belongs to the administrative district of South Cambridgeshire. Since 1985 the village has formed part of the parish of Oakington and West ...

Cambridgeshire Cambridgeshire (abbreviated Cambs.) is a county in the East of England, bordering Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the north-east, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfordshire to the south, and Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire to the ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. His father was William George Searle."William George Searle"
''Geni.com''. Retrieved 28 December 2018. As a child, he knew Clerk Maxwell, whom he considered to be a humorous individual. In 1888 he began work at the Cavendish Laboratory 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 ...

, and ended up working with the lab for 55 years. After World War II, he ran the undergraduate labs. The equipment he used with Thomson to calibrate the ohm in the 1890s was still being used in the undergraduate lab.

Contributions to science

Searle is known for his work on the velocity dependence of the

electromagnetic mass Electromagnetic mass was initially a concept of classical mechanics, denoting as to how much the electromagnetic field, or the self-energy, is contributing to the mass of charged particles. It was first derived by J. J. Thomson in 1881 and was for ...

. This was a direct predecessor of Einstein's theory of special relativity, when several people were investigating the change of mass with velocity. Following the work of

Oliver Heaviside Oliver Heaviside FRS (; 18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925) was an English self-taught mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations (equivalent to the Laplace transform), independently developed ...

, he defined the "Heaviside ellipsoid", in which the

electrostatic field An electric field (sometimes E-field) is the physical field that surrounds electrically charged particles and exerts force on all other charged particles in the field, either attracting or repelling them. It also refers to the physical field f ...

is contracted in the line of motion. Those developments, when modified, were ultimately important for the development of

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 ...

Personal life

Searle was married to Alice Mary Edwards. He contracted a disease at the beginning of World War I, was cured, and became a Christian Scientist. He was a keen cyclist and travelled about proselytizing.

Bibliography

Searle was the author of papers and books, including:
''Experimental elasticity''
(1908) Cambridge Univ. Press
''Experimental harmonic motion A Manual for the Laboratory'', 1st edition
(1915) Cambridge Univ. Press
''Experimental harmonic motion'', 2nd edition
(1922) Cambridge Univ. Press *''Experimental optics'', 1st edition (1925) Cambridge Univ. Press *''Experimental optics'', 2nd edition (1935) Cambridge Univ. Press *''Experimental physics'', (1934) Cambridge Univ. Press *''Oliver Heaviside, the man'' (1987) C.A.M. Publishing, England (written in 1950, published posthumously)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Searle, George Frederick Charles Fellows of the Royal Society 1864 births 1954 deaths People from Oakington Velocity Electromagnetic radiation Special relativity