MPG.PuRe (Max Planck repository): Lalli's Ives papers (2026-10-07)

Queries (Google): "Anti-Relativity in Action" "Herbert E. Ives"; "Revival of the Larmor-Lorentz ether" Lalli Ives. Item page https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/faces/ViewItemOverviewPage.jsp?itemId=item_2280652 (Lalli 2013 record; an Anubis proof-of-work bot page passed by itself). Full PDF of the conference volume: https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2280639_1/component/file_2280638/content (Omodeo et al. eds 2014, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Athens 2012, 718 pp.). Chapter pages extracted to research/files/Lalli-2014-Revival-of-Larmor-Lorentz-ether-Ives-ESHS-2012-pp359-365.pdf.

Roberto Lalli (then MIT STS program), "The Revival of the Larmor-Lorentz ether Theories: Herbert E. Ives' Opposition to Relativity between 1937 and 1953", pp.359-365 [web]: - Ives's two strategies: attack the second postulate (constancy of light speed) and build an alternative ether theory explaining the same results. - Ives's "Larmor-Lorentz theory" = real contraction of lengths and real slowing of clock frequencies by motion through a stationary ether, with absolute simultaneity; Lalli equates it with Grunbaum's "doubly amended ether theory", empirically equivalent to SRT for optical experiments (citing Janssen 2002). - Roots: Ives's father and R. W. Wood (his Johns Hopkins PhD adviser); the American optics tradition of Michelson and Dayton C. Miller, who kept the ether; Wood's Physical Optics (1934) credited Miller's ether-drift result. - Ives's self-description in a letter: heir of "the classical English school of physical thought, which [he] would like to think [he was] championing, against the paradox of the Semitic school" (Ives to E. E. Butterfield, 5 Oct 1951, LoC Box 13). Lalli reads this as implicitly anti-Semitic and links it to the German anti-relativity group (Lalli 2013). This is Lalli's reading of a private letter; the letter itself has not been read in this review. - Ives's natural-philosophy vs prediction-only distinction: Ives 1940, "The Measurement of Velocity with Atomic Clocks", Science 91:79-84. - P. W. Bridgman: sympathetic, used Ives's arguments in his posthumous "A Sophisticate's Primer of Relativity" (1962; 2nd ed. Dover 1983); his unpublished "Comments on Ives' Papers on Relativity" (18 Aug 1959, Harvard University Archives, Bridgman Papers, HUG 4234.50) objected that Ives's real-but-undeterminable absolute simultaneity was "a complete negation of the operational attitude which [Ives] correctly adopt[ed] in most other situations". - Lalli 2013 itself: Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 43(1):41-104 (paywalled at UC Press; abstract read at https://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article-abstract/43/1/41/105735/). Abstract: Ives was "the most important American opponent of Einstein during that era"; his views were "mainly ignored" in his lifetime but helped spark late-1950s debate on the conventionality of distant simultaneity; the paper contrasts the public network of allies in his publications with a "hidden network of allies present in his correspondence", and links the hardening of his tone to "progressive marginalization".

Bearing: supplies a professional historian's account of Ives's principles in his own terms (claims 2, 3), the archival basis (LoC, Harvard Bridgman papers, Caltech Robertson papers), and a named sympathetic-but-critical evaluator (Bridgman).