🚀 go-pugleaf

>> = Wolfgang G. Gasser in news:f7tsd5$olb$1@atlas.ip-plus.net
>  = Juan R. in news:1185106075.319950.70390@w3g2000hsg.googlegroups.com

>> The criticism of the lack of references often boils down to
>> this: In 1905 Einstein should have given credit to Poincar�'s
>> work of 1905, published however only in 1906.
>
> Einstein would not know July 1905 Poincar�'s paper while writing
> his own paper, but the June 1905 Poincare Note to the Academy
> arrived in Bern, in time, by June 12 or 13, and it was a part of
> Einstein's job to read it.

Are you serious? Do you suggest that it was Einstein's job at the
patent office to read "les comptes rendus de l'Acad�mie des sciences
de Paris"? And as far as I know, Einstein at least in the past had
had some problems with the French language. Einstein's relativity
paper was received on 2005-06-30 by the Annalen der Physik. Thus it
must have been finished at least some days earlier. So there remain
only around ten days or two weeks from the theoretical possibility
of having read the article of Poincar� to the completion of the
relativity paper.

Einstein's thirty-page article is not a conglomerate of ad-hoc-
hypotheses but a rather consistent work based on fundamental
principles, where most things are linked with each other. Unlike
in constructive theories, it is not possible to introduce a new
fundamental principle in an already more or less completed theory
of principles (Prinzipientheorie). Do you suggest that Einstein
wrote the whole article within a maximum of two weeks, or that
he substantially reworked the article in those days?

I've found a possible source of your claim:

 "Einstein n'a �videmment pas pu utiliser le travail de Poincar�
  de juillet 1905 pour �crire son propre texte, mais la Note �
  l'Acad�mie du 5 juin 1905 est arriv�e � Berne, � temps, le 12 ou
  le 13 juin, et la lire faisait partie de son travail ordinaire.
  On peut d'ailleurs remarquer qu'Einstein r�sumait r�guli�rement
  pour les Annalen der Physik les travaux de physique les plus
  int�ressants, y compris ceux parus dans les comptes rendus de
  l'Acad�mie des sciences de Paris (voir par exemple la r�f�rence
  18, avec entre autres l'analyse du travail de M. Ponsot, C.R.
  140, S pages 1176-1179, 1905).
  http://annales.org/archives/x/poincare7.html

"R�f�rence 18" is a Review of Auguste Ponsot, "Heat in the
Displacement of the Equilibrium of a Capillary System",
Comptes rendues, 1905-05-01. Einstein's review was published
in the second half of September.

I could find only one further review of a note of Comptes rendus
from 1905 by Einstein: Review of Paul Langevin, "On a Fundamental
Formula Formula of the Kinetic Theorie", 1905-01-02. This review
was published in the second half of June.
( See: Comptes rendus, 140, pages 35-38 and 1176-1179,
  http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k30949.pagination )

Both notes are in French, and both notes deal with problems
(heat, capillarity, kinetic theory) which also are central in
articles Einstein had published earlier. So the hypothesis that
others called Einstein's attention specially to these notes could
be more reasonable than that Einstein regularly read the Comptes
rendus.


Poincar�'s note from June 1905 does not contain the word
'relativity'. It would be interesting to analyse the differences
between the short and long version of "Sur la dynamique de
l'�lectron". In the note Poincar� only wrote: It seems that
this impossibility to detect the absolute motion is a general
law of  nature. ("Il semble que cette impossibilit� de d�montrer
le mouvement absolu soit une loi g�n�rale de la nature.")

In the paper published in 1906 he added: We are naturally led to
this law, which we will call the postulate of relativity, and to
accept it without exception. ("Il semble que cette impossibilit�
de mettre en �vidence exp�rimentalement le mouvement absolu de
la Terre soit une loi g�n�rale de la Nature; nous sommes
naturellement port� � admettre cette loi que nous appellerons
le Postulat de Relativit� et � l'admettre sans restriction.")

Very interesting is this (from the 1906 paper):

"Dans cette th�orie [de Lorentz], deux longueurs �gales, ce sont,
 par d�finition, deux longueurs que la lumi�re met le m�me temps
 � parcourir.

 Peut-�tre suffirait-il de renoncer � cette d�finition, pour que
 la th�orie de Lorentz f�t aussi compl�tement boulevers�e que l'a
 �t� le syst�me de Ptol�m�e par l'intervention de Copernic."

That "equal lengths are by definition lengths which light passes
in identical times" is probably more characteristic of Einstein's
than of Lorentz' theory. Anyway, Poincar� compares a theory based
on such a length definition with the system of Ptolemy which
later was completely overthrown by Copernicus. And such a
revolution, he suggests, might be done by simply rejecting this
length definition. (This rejection would obviously also entail
a rejection of relativity as conceived by Einstein).

This elegantly shows that Poincar� still left the doors open to
other possible developments in physics. Yet Einstein, from the
beginning advocated only one single line of reasoning.

In 'La science and et l'hypoth�se' there is a chapter on the
relativity principle ('Le mouvement relativ et le mouvement
absolue'). It deals however only with the classical relativity
principle. In the last chapter 'La fin de la mati�re' Poincar�
mentions the length-contraction hypothesis of Fitzgerald and the
assumption of Lorentz that even better experiments will not be
able to detect the absolute motion of the earth. 'Relativity'
is not mentioned, however.

Another quote from  http://annales.org/archives/x/poincare7.html :

  Le congr�s scientifique mondial de Saint-louis (Missouri,
  septembre 1904, publi� en novembre 1904):

  Henri Poincar� est invit� � pr�senter une conf�rence g�n�rale
  sur "L'�tat actuel et l'avenir de la Physique math�matique".
  Il ajoute audacieusement le "principe de relativit�" au cinq
  principes classiques de la Physique:

  "Le principe de relativit�, d'apr�s lequel les lois des
  ph�nom�nes physiques doivent �tre les m�mes pour un observateur
  fixe et pour un observateur entra�n� dans un mouvement de
  translation uniforme, de sorte que nous n'avons et ne pouvons
  avoir aucun moyen de discerner si nous sommes, oui ou non,
  emport�s dans un pareil mouvement.".

This principle of relativity (i.e. the equivalence of all
inertial movements), which Poincar� in 1904 "audaciously added
to the five classical principles of physics", had already been
considered by many as a fundamental principle of physics over
hundreds of years!

In any case, the behaviour of Poincar� towards Einstein is quite
similar to the behaviour of Galilei who fought Kepler in a subtle
and efficient way, so that still today many people believe that
it was Galilei who created the modern astronomy/physics and that
Kepler still believed in Aristotelian physics. On Kepler see:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics/msg/03a834e964d439a4

So one might even speculate that Einstein's reluctance to express
an opinion on Poincar�'s relativity paper might have been caused
by his suspicion that Poincar�'s final version published in 1906
in a second rate Italian journal could be less independent of his
own work than the "Juillet 1905" at the end would make us believe.

Cheers, Wolfgang