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Although Einstein enjoyed almost universal acclaim in his day, history has exalted his genius still further by forgetting those few detractors who did exist. . . . Herbert Ives, a physicist for Bell Laboratories, remained unshakeably opposed to relativity, though the Ives-Stillwell experiment which bears his name is generally interpreted as a direct corroboration of Einstein's theory: "His [Ives'] work on the so-called tranverse Doppler effect, performed with Stillwell in the period 1938-41, is one of three crucial optical experiments which, taken together, lead inductively to the Lorentz transformations as used in the special theory of relativity; in a sense it, more than either of the two, may be considered as the cornerstone of the special principle of relativity, as formulated years before by Einstein. . . ." (Howard P. Robertson, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, 1956) "The 'principle' of the constancy of the velocity of light is not merely 'ununderstandable', it is not supported by 'objective matters of fact'; it is untenable, and, as we shall see, unnecessary. . . . Also of philosophical import is that with the abandonment of the 'principle' of the constancy of the velocity of light, the geometries which have been based on it, with their fusion of space and time, must be denied their claim to be a true description of the physical world."
