When was special relativity discovered?
History of special relativity
At the same time, when Lorentz worked out his theory, Wien (1903) recognized an important consequence of the velocity dependence of mass. He argued that superluminal velocities were impossible, because that would require an infinite amount of energy— the same was already noted by Thomson (1893) and Searle (1897). And in June 1904, after he had read Lorentz's 1904 paper, he noticed the same in relation to length contraction, because at superluminal velocities the factor 






1
−


v

2




/



c

2








{\displaystyle \scriptstyle {\sqrt {1-{v^{2}}/{c^{2}}}}}

 becomes imaginary.[47]