ABSTRACT
Newtonian mechanics was developed mainly in the seventeenth century, whereas the wave theory of physical optics and the theory of classical electromagnetism were developed mainly in the nineteenth century. Physical optics can now be interpreted in terms of electromagnetic waves using Maxwell's equations, so that, after Maxwell's work, classical optics and electricity and magnetism were unified into the same theory. The enormous successes of Newtonian mechanics naturally led people to assume that the Galilean transformations were correct. However, if we try to cast our minds back to the nineteenth century, at that time no experiments on very high-speed particles had been performed, and for centuries Newton's theories had appeared to be the perfect examples for all physical theories. Thus it was natural in the nineteenth century to assume that the Galilean transformations, which were based on Newtonian mechanics, were correct, and could be applied to the laws of optics and of electricity and magnetism.
