This committee had as its task to advice the goverment on the effects of the enclosure of the Zuiderzee, an estuary of the North See, on the tides at the North Sea dikes in the northern part of the Netherlands. He made important contributions to the Dutch public cause, through his many public lectures and his work in goverment advisory committees, the most important was the Zuiderzee Committee, which he chaired. He also became a revered public figure in the Netherlands, especially in the last decades of his life. In addition to his work in electromagnetism, Lorentz made important contributions to many other fields of physics, including hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, general relativity, radiation theory, and quantum theory. Lorentz was fully aware of the experimental impossibility to actually show the existence of the ether nevertheless he clung to this concept until his death.
The foundations of the two theories, however, were as different as could be: whereas special relativity is based on the equivalence of all reference systems, in Lorentz’s theory a preferred system remained: the reference system connected to the ether. The electron theory was also in a sense a precursor of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity: in its final form the electron theory described electromagnetic phenomena in moving systems with the same formalism as special relativity. Lorentz’s “electron theory,” as the final version was called, provided a major conceptual clarification of the theory of electromagnetic phenomena and became the basis of all subsequent developments in this field. Building on the results of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, Lorentz developed a unified theory of electromagnetism, based on a general atomistic model of matter and on the existence of small electrically charged particles, later named electrons.
But it was implied that Lorentz also received the prize for his pioneering theoretical work in the field of electromagnetism. The most striking success of this research was the experimental discovery by Zeeman and the theoretical explanation by Lorentz of the phenomenon now known as the Zeeman effect: the splitting of spectral lines in several components under the influence of an external magnetic field. He received a Nobel Prize in 1902 (the second year the prize was awarded), together with his Amsterdam colleague Pieter Zeeman, for their work on the influence of magnetism on radiation phenomena. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928) was the most famous Dutch physicist in the last decades of the nineteenth and the frst ones of the twentieth century.
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