Besides these objections to Ritz’s views, it must be realised that Michelson’s experiment was only one of many. Here it cannot be emphasised too strongly that the gravity of the situation arose from the fact that as a result of a large number of different experiments (many of which we have not mentioned), the entire structure of classical electrodynamics seemed to be crumbling on every side. Ritz’s hypothesis consists in shoving one individual brick back into place. Lorentz, thanks to his mathematical knowledge, realised that something much deeper was at the root of all the trouble and that more radical means would have to be adopted. Accordingly, he proceeded to tackle the very foundations of science, namely, the space and time transformations which had endured for centuries. But Lorentz only proceeded in a half-hearted way and did not have the courage to push his discoveries to their logical conclusion, contenting himself with patching up rather than reconstructing. Einstein, as we shall see, took the bull by the horns, abandoned the classical structure, and proceeded to build up an entirely new edifice, superbly coherent and free from all artificial support and scaffoldings. Thus it was that even before Ritz’s hypothesis was disproved by numerous direct investigations (experiments of Majorana and of Sagnac, and astronomical observations on double stars by de Sitter), scientists had ceased to give it serious consideration. [Pg 141] PART II THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY [Pg 143] CHAPTER XIII EINSTEIN’S SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY HOWEVER unsatisfactory, for the numerous reasons already discussed, Lorentz’s theory might appear, it constituted for some years the only possible explanation of the negative results of all electromagnetic experiments performed on the earth’s surface. But in 1905 Einstein published a paper on the “Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” a document destined to prove one of the most epochal events in the history of human thought. In this paper, all the cobwebs of electrodynamics were swept aside.