🚀 go-pugleaf

On 30 Oct, 15:35, Tom Roberts <tjroberts...@sbcglobal.net> wrote in
sci.physics.relativity:
> Pmb wrote:
> > "harry" <harald.vanlintelButNotT...@epfl.ch> wrote in message
> >news:1193741501_2993@sicinfo3.epfl.ch...
> >> it was Poincare who first stressed that all laws of nature should
> >> be the same while Lorentz and Einstein limited it to electromagnetism and
> >> mechanics.
>
> > As well as optics. That's interesting. I didn't realize he didn't indlude
> > all the laws of nature.
>
> Because Einstein DID include all the laws of nature, not just EM. Just
> go READ the first postulate in his 1905 paper on relativity. Harry is
> just plain wrong here (about Einstein).
>
> >>> Do you believe that all physicists at the time who were interested in
> >>> Einstein's theory were ignorant of Poincare's?
> >> Certainly Lorentz didn't pay enough attention at the time, and Poincare
> >> was occupied with too many things.
>
> > That's one person, not the physics community.
>
> Poincare' wrote in French, and the language of physics at the time was
> German. This reduced the awareness of the physics community of
> Poincare's work. Amazingly, even Lorentz wrote some papers in German (!).
>
>         Yes, Continental intellectuals are more multi-lingual
>         than Americans or Australians, and this was even more
>         pronounced back then, but I still think the language
>         difference was significant.
>
> >>> Why didn't the physics community accept Poincare's theory as the defining
> >>> relativity theory instead of Einstein?
>
> Because Poincare' never made the intellectual leap that Einstein did --
> accepting a redefinition of spatial and temporal intervals in different
> inertial frames.

This "intellectual leap" reminds me of Rutherford's words:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/academ/whatswrongwithrelativity.html
"It is not surprising, therefore, that genuine physicists were not
impressed: they tended to agree with Rutherford. After Wilhelm Wien
had tried to impress him with the splendours of relativity, without
success, and exclaimed in despair "No Anglo-Saxon can understand
relativity!", Rutherford guffawed and replied "No! they've got too
much sense !"

For the same reason Poincare was unable to make or understand
Einstein's "intellectual leap".

Pentcho Valev