Joseph Larmor

Born the son of a Belfast shopkeeper in 1857, Joseph Larmor studied maths here at St John’s and became Senior Wrangler (achieved the highest mark in the final year exams in Cambridge). Thankfully he saw the light, and although he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics - a post inhabited by Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac and Charles Babbage amongst other top-class scientists - thanks to a myriad of publications we can safely call him a physicist.

As with many eminent theorists that live through years of paradigm shift in their subject, Joseph Larmor could very well have been famous for his stark opposition of what we now believe to be universal truths (or close enough).

For even Wikipedia, the world's most infallible knowledge source, states that his most influential work, Aether and Matter, a theoretical physics book published in 1900 has in its very title a concept disproved by physicists a hundred years ago. The Aether was considered a medium in which light travelled. Sound can travel through the air but not a vacuum, so the luminiferous aether was proposed as a way of accounting for how light travelled through space. In his book, Larmor proposed that the aether could be represented as a homogeneous fluid medium which was perfectly incompressible and elastic. Larmor believed the aether was separate from matter. It was hypothesised that the Earth at all times was drifting through an aether “wind”.

Coupled with that, his initial support of the Special Theory of Relativity turned quickly to disagreement which was further compounded by his rejection of the curvature of space. In opposition to the Special Theory, he famously declared that absolute time was essential to modern astronomy.

But the beauty of science is its fascinating ability to forget the past in its quest for ever more knowledge and the search for universal truths (or close enough). Three years before publishing Aether and Matter, he correctly predicted the phenomenon of time dilation. The concept that “moving clocks run slow” is a counter-intuitive one. It predicts that a clock on an aeroplane orbiting the equator, initially set to the same time as a clock fixed at a point on the equator, will “tick” at a slower rate than the one fixed at the equator.

On top of that he produced the Lorentz transformations years before Einstein and Lorentz did, although admittedly he did this in relation to the aether and he did not include the correct velocity transformations (Henry Poincaré later correctly calculated the addition of velocities formula). He also independently verified length contraction for atoms that were held together by electromagnetic forces.

As well as being interested in physics, he became a member of parliament 1911, representing Cambridge University as a member of the Liberal Unionist Party.

Retiring from politics in 1932, he moved back to Northern Ireland and lived out the remaining years of his life.

Everyone makes mistakes, big intellects are prone to making big mistakes, but on average it is clear that Joseph Larmor, the son of a shopkeeper, the Johnian, the mathematician-turned-physicist, the luminferous aether proponent, the physicist-turned-politician, was instrumental in the development of theoretical physics in the early 20th century. Therefore we are incredibly proud to belong to a society named in his honour, on average.