George Frederick Charles Searle
Born(1864-12-03)3 December 1864
Oakington
Died16 December 1954(1954-12-16) (aged 90)
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
Known forElectromagnetic mass
Searle's bar method
SpouseAlice Mary Edwards
AwardsFRS[1]
Scientific career
InstitutionsCavendish Laboratory

George Frederick Charles Searle FRS[1] (3 December 1864 – 16 December 1954) was a British physicist and teacher.[2] He also raced competitively as a cyclist while at the University of Cambridge.[3]

Biography

Searle was born in Oakington, Cambridgeshire, England. His father was William George Searle.[4]

As a child, he knew Clerk Maxwell, whom he considered to be a humorous individual. In 1888 he began work at the Cavendish Laboratory under J.J. Thomson, and ended up working with the lab for 55 years. After World War II, he ran the undergraduate labs. The equipment he used with Thomson to calibrate the ohm in the 1890s was still being used in the undergraduate lab.

Contributions to science

Searle is known for his work on the velocity dependence of the electromagnetic mass. This was a direct predecessor of Einstein's theory of special relativity, when several people were investigating the change of mass with velocity. Following the work of Oliver Heaviside, he defined the "Heaviside ellipsoid", in which the electrostatic field is contracted in the line of motion. Those developments, when modified, were ultimately important for the development of special relativity.

Personal life

Searle was married to Alice Mary Edwards. He contracted a disease at the beginning of World War I, was cured, and became a Christian Scientist. He was a keen cyclist and travelled about proselytizing.

Bibliography

Wikisource has original works by or about:
George Frederick Charles Searle

Searle was the author of papers and books, including:

References

  1. 1 2 Thomson, George (1955). "George Frederick Charles Searle 1864-1954". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 1: 246–252. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1955.0018. JSTOR 769255. S2CID 71913224.
  2. ↑ Searle, G. F. C. (1896). "On the Steady Motion of an Electrified Ellipsoid". Proceedings of the Physical Society of London. 15 (1): 264–278. Bibcode:1896PPSL...15..264S. doi:10.1088/1478-7814/15/1/323.
  3. ↑ "George Frederick Charles Searle's Palmares at CyclingRanking.com". CyclingRanking.com.
  4. ↑ "William George Searle". Geni.com. Retrieved 28 December 2018.
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