[1] Voigt taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen and eventually went on to head the Mathematical Physics Department there.

He was succeeded in 1914 by Peter Debye, who took charge of the theoretical department of the Physical Institute.

Voigt worked on crystal physics, thermodynamics and electro-optics.

His main work was the Lehrbuch der Kristallphysik (Textbook on crystal physics), first published in 1910.

He was also an amateur musician and became known as a Bach expert (see External links).

He was the first to suggest, in 1886, that Bach's Concerto for two harpsichords in C minor, BWV 1060 was originally scored for violin and oboe.

Hermann Minkowski said in 1908 that the transformations which play the main role in the principle of relativity were first examined by Voigt in 1887.

Also Hendrik Lorentz (1909) is on record as saying that he could have taken these transformations into his theory of electrodynamics, if only he had known of them, rather than developing his own.

It is interesting then to examine the consequences of these transformations from this point of view.

Lorentz might then have seen that the transformation introduced relativity of simultaneity, and also time dilation.

The experimental measurement of time dilation by Ives and Stillwell (1938) and others settled the issue in favor of the Lorentz transformation.