The Prehistory of Relativity

Abstract

Years ago, I wrote a paper on the prehistory of black holes (Eisenstaedt 1991). It dealt essentially with the history of the concept of dark bodies, so named by (1796, 2:304–306) who most probably took the idea from the work of John Michell. Actually, I showed how John Michell constructed, essentially in his 1784 article (Michell 1784), the Newtonian theory of the action of gravitation on light. Elsewhere I showed how Michell’s ideas are deeply rooted in Newton’s theories: not only his gravitation of course but also his corpuscular theory of light. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Arago was to use Michell’s ideas in order to think over and perform his well-known experiment on the velocity of light. He was to show then that the velocity of light was constant and his experiment, which was a predecessor of the Michelson experiment, drove him to support Fresnel’s ideas. In this article, I will come back to these trains of thought which concern light and gravitation from Newton to Arago.¹

In homage to John Stachel for his 70th birthday.