Abstract

On the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Professor Parry Moon. February 14, 1898. the paper summarizes his work on the study of the foundations of relativity. The beginning was his first project when he came to M.I.T. in 1924, as assistant to Vannevar Bush. an attempt to disprove relativity experimentally-and its nearly fatal end. Rather than questioning the details of Einstein's theory of relativity, Professor Moon chose to question the postulates on which the theory of relativity rests: the postulate that the velocity of light is always constant and the general validity of the Maxwell equations. First came many years of study of the Ritz and Einstein postulates on the velocity of light, finally the proposal of the universal time postulate in 1956 and eventually the experimental proof of its validity. Half a century was devoted to the search for the keystone of electromagnetic theory, the equation for the force between moving charges, which culminated in the development of the new Gaussian equation for the force between moving charges and the realization that the Maxwell equations themselves must be slightly modified.