Uncovering the Truth Behind the Founders of Relativity: A Comprehensive Analysis

[harrylin]

But Poincare never wrote down the transformation equation that he expected the laws of physics to be invariant under prior to Lorentz, right? It seems like both Poincare and Einstein were taking Lorentz's work and drawing out certain physical implications that Lorentz himself didn't fully understand or realize the central importance of...I suppose Einstein's approach of starting with the two postulates and deriving everything from that was more clear and compelling to the audience of physicists reading these papers at the time.

I think so too. Poincare was an overly modest mathematician who already died in 1912. There also appears to have been some manipulation against Poincare, for political aims. And Einstein's 1905 paper gives a full overview, it reads a bit like a textbook with a good introduction.

Nevertheless, relativity before GR was regarded as the theory of Einstein and Lorentz. If I understand it correctly, it changed when Eddington's mission brought Einstein fame. From then on people started to talk about "relativity" as meaning GR, and SR was simply perceived as part of Einstein's GR. And Lorentz died in 1928.

 

[PAllen]

I think so too. Poincare was an overly modest mathematician who already died in 1912. There also appears to have been some manipulation against Poincare, for political aims. And Einstein's 1905 paper gives a full overview, it reads a bit like a textbook with a good introduction.

Nevertheless, relativity before GR was regarded as the theory of Einstein and Lorentz. If I understand it correctly, it changed when Eddington's mission brought Einstein fame. From then on people started to talk about "relativity" as meaning GR, and SR was simply perceived as part of Einstein's GR. And Lorentz died in 1928.

An abiding mystery for me is that Poincare was, by 1900, a long established world famous mathemetician and mathematical physicist, with groundbreaking physical contributions (e.g. his approach to orbital computations are, I believe, still used today for spacecraft ). He was nominated numerous times for the Nobel (however, in the early 1900s, the Nobel committee had a strong experimental bias; the very delayed prize for Max Planck was the beginning of the end of this excessive bias. I believe Poincare has the record for nominations without receiving the prize.). Einstein was a nobody in 1905.

I don't have a fully satisfying explanation, but a few parts seem to be:

Poincare published his ideas in fragmentary form, in journals not read by most physicists. Some key ideas were in letters, not formally published. Einstein published in the leading physics journal of the day, with very physical motivations (rather than mathematical). Finally, he was noticed by Planck, who was top of the field.

One thing I've also noticed is that the complexity of credit has never been a mystery among those really expert. For example, I've noticed in papers by Professor Carlip, he scrupulously credits Poincare for any result achieved before Einstein.