🚀 go-pugleaf

ILoveSanta ha escrito:

> Einstein is perhaps most famous for the special theory of relativity,
> published in 1905 in the German physics journal, Annalen der Physik.
> The paper was devoid of references, a fact that Einstein's friend and
> Nobel prize winner for physics, Max Born, found troubling.
>
> "The striking point is that it contains not a single reference to
> previous literature," Born stated in 1955, before the International
> Relativity Conference in Bern. "It gives you the impression of quite a
> new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not
> true."

And several modern historians are rather convinced that Einstein read
Poincare previous works.

> Though Einstein's 1905 article contained no references, it was so
> strikingly similar to a paper written by Hendrik Lorentz the previous
> year, that Walter Kaufmann and Max Planck felt a need to publicly point
> out that Einstein had merely provided a metaphysical reinterpretation
> and generalisation of Lorentz' scientific theory, a metaphysical
> reinterpretation and generalisation Henri Poincare had already
> published.
>
> As Charles Nordmann, astronomer to the Paris Observatory, pointed out:
> "It is really to Henri Poincare, the great Frenchman whose death has
> left a void that will never be filled, that we must accord the merit of
> having first proved, with the greatest lucidity and the most prudent
> audacity, that time and space, as we know them, can only be relative. A
> few quotations from his works will not be out of place. They will show
> that the credit for most of the things which are currently attributed
> to Einstein is, in reality, due to Poincare."

I see no problem with recognizing contributions each one did. I see
problems with public image of Eintein as doing he alone the theory
which is of course not true as any historian or even physicists will
agree: Lorentz and Poincare are cited in relativity textbooks. They are
no so cited in books for public.

I personally think that Lorentz and specially Poincare reserve more
merits than the traditional one. Fortunately, several recent treatises
and papers begin to treat Poincare contributions thanks to
republications and translations of several Poincare papers. It will be
a matter of time that historical treatises will adapt to new historical
data.

> The completed field equations of the general theory of relativity were
> first deduced by David Hilbert, a fact Einstein was forced to
> acknowledge in 1916, after he had plagiarised them from Hilbert in late
> 1915.

It is true that Einstein forgot to cite Hilbert contributions including
Hilbert analysis and corrections of previous Einstein papers, but i
think that Hilbert also benefit from Einstein work. I personally call
field equations the Hilbert/Einstein equations.

> Paul Gerber solved the problem of the perihelion of Mercury in
> 1898.

Using what? A Weber like force?