Hendrik Antoon Lorentz

Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon (1853–1928), Dutch physicist awarded with Pieter Zeeman the 1902 Nobel Prize for physics for his prediction of the Zeeman effect (the effects of magnetism on light). Lorentz also introduced the idea of “local time,” that is, that the rate of time's passage differed from place to place. Incorporating this idea with George Francis Fitzgerald's proposal that a moving body decreases in direction of motion (the Fitzgerald contraction), he derived the Lorentz transformation, a mathematical statement that describes the changes in length, time, and mass of a moving body. His work, with Fitzgerald's, laid the foundations for Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

See also: Zeeman effect.