Was Einstein a plagiarist ?

[Huzington]

A few weeks ago I read an article called "Einstein, plagiarist of the century":

http://allais.maurice.free.fr/English/Einstein1.htm

A flawed article, from a highly unreliable source (Nexus); but Richard Moody is not the only man who is saying this, and more qualified authors have come to the same basic conclusion and have advanced far more cogent arguments. Richard Moody, it appears, doesn't know as much as he should about general relativity, but the same cannot be said of the authors and physicists below who have come to the same conclusions as he.


Einstein's plagiarism in the news:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/15/einstein_relativity/
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mp/2003/09/1...91800260100.htm
http://www.hindustantimes.com/2004/Dec/02/...31,00040009.htm
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2004553345,00.html
http://www.energygrid.com/science/news.html
http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.as...ure&class_id=17
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Distribution/Red...-102274,00.html

Other sources alleging the same thing:

http://www.physics.unr.edu/faculty/winterberg/myth.pdf
http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/a..._mccausland.pdf
http://www.physics.unr.edu/faculty/winterb...rt-Einstein.pdf
http://www.znaturforsch.com/59a/59a0715.pdf
http://data.ufn.ru//ufn04/ufn04_6/Russian/r046e.pdf
http://xxx.arxiv.cornell.edu/PS_cache/phys...405/0405075.pdf
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/faq/gamma-mass-13.html


"The appearance of Dr. Silberstein's recent article on 'General Relativity without the Equivalence Hypothesis' encourages me to restate my own views on the subject. I am perhaps entitled to do this as my work on the subject of General Relativity was published before that of Einstein and Kottler, and appears to have been overlooked by recent writers." -- Harry Bateman

* * *

"All this was maintained by Poincare and others long before the time of Einstein, and one does injustice to truth in ascribing the discovery to him." -- Charles Nordmann

* * *

"[Einstein's] paper 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper' in Annalen der Physik. . . contains not a single reference to previous literature. It gives you the impression of quite a new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not true." -- Max Born

* * *

"In point of fact, therefore, Poincare was not only the first to enunciate the principle, but he also discovered in Lorentz's work the necessary mathematical formulation of the principle. All this happened before Einstein's paper appeared." -- G. H. Keswani

* * *

"Einstein's explanation is a dimensional disguise for Lorentz's. . . . Thus Einstein's theory is not a denial of, nor an alternative for, that of Lorentz. It is only a duplicate and disguise for it. . . . Einstein continually maintains that the theory of Lorentz is right, only he disagrees with his 'interpretation.' Is it not clear, therefore, that in this, as in other cases, Einstein's theory is merely a disguise for Lorentz's, the apparent disagreement about 'interpretation' being a matter of words only?" -- James Mackaye

 

[Ziggurat]

They're all full of crap. First and foremost, note the obsession with E=mc^2. This is a diversion. It is a consequence of relativity, to be sure, but it is NOT at the heart of relativity. Knowing that equation tells you almost nothing about relativity as a whole. The heart of relativity is not in that equation, but in the space-time metric, s^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - (ct)^2.

Similarly with Lorenz's famous contraction formula. Lorenz was trying to fix ether theory to conform to the Michelson-Morley results, and that's what comes out. But it's a cludge. He didn't understand where it comes from, it's only the empirical result. It was Einstein's space-time metric which reveals the actual physics behind the Lorenz formulas.

Likewise with the ideas of the speed of light being a limiting velocity, or the idea that all motion is relative (which is actually a Galilean principle, the only problem was reconciling it with E&M). It's fine to propose such ideas, but nobody before Einstein actually got the math right on how to actually reconcile all these principles (which is, once again, the space-time metric). Until I see some evidence that someone came up with the actual space-time METRIC before Einstein, then the critical insight of special relativity remains attributable SOLELY to Einstein himself.

And finally, and perhaps most humorously, at least one of your "sources" also claims that relativity is wrong (I'm not going to wade through them all). Here was the page you linked:
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/faq/gamma-mass-13.html
And on this page from the same site (linked to on the page you listed), the claim that Einstein was wrong:
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/faq/invalidation.html
Not sure why anyone would really get upset about someone plagiarizing a theory that wasn't even correct. But this page is simply wrong. It says,
"From a fixed location on Earth, we can detect the Earth's motion. Therefore, contrary to Einstein principle of relativity, the velocity of light is not relative to the observer. One must conclude that the Sagnac effect contradicts Einstein's hypothesis of General Relativity."

What it's talking about is the rotation of the earth about its axis, not the motion of earth through space. But apparently whoever wrote this is too stupid to recognize that a rotating frame is not an inertial frame, and so the idea that you should not be able to detect the rotation of your own reference frame is simply wrong. It's wrong in special relativity, it's wrong in Newtonian physics, it's simply wrong, and anyone who understands physics will see right through it. You don't even need lasers to detect the rotation of the earth (the example he used), you can measure it quite easily with the precession of a pendulum. This hardly violates relativity, either Einstein's theory of relativity or Galilean relativity. So the author of this page clearly doesn't understand physics to begin with, so it's not shocking that he cannot recognize Einstein's achievement for what it is.

 

[wollery]

More to the point, this isn't plagiarism, it's precisely how science works. People build on previous findings, combining ideas, theories and results from other researchers. Very few of us ever come up with something completely new. Einstein's genius was to take several different pieces of the puzzle and work through the maths until he arrived at a coherent answer.

 

[H3LL]

More to the point, this isn't plagiarism, it's precisely how science works. People build on previous findings, combining ideas, theories and results from other researchers. Very few of us ever come up with something completely new. Einstein's genius was to take several different pieces of the puzzle and work through the maths until he arrived at a coherent answer.

Nicely put.

Theirs is goddidit thinking, that things should appear fully formed. This almost never happens in science. It's the same goddidit thinking with the idea that if any part of Darwin's discoveries can be shown to be flawed, the whole of evolutionary theory collapses.

It just goes to show that if you can indoctrinate people early enough and often enough you can even influence the thought processes of educated people.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

An additional point which should be made is that none of those quotes you have posted actually seem to constitute accusations of plagiarism.

"The appearance of Dr. Silberstein's recent article on 'General Relativity without the Equivalence Hypothesis' encourages me to restate my own views on the subject. I am perhaps entitled to do this as my work on the subject of General Relativity was published before that of Einstein and Kottler, and appears to have been overlooked by recent writers." -- Harry Bateman

Einstein's work on General Relativity was published quite some time after his original work on Special Relativity (several years later, if I recall). It is a generalization of special relativity to non-inertial frames. The fact that other authors published papers on the subject during the period in-between should come as no surprise, and certainly does not imply that Einstein's work on the subject was plagiarized from the previous work of others.

"All this was maintained by Poincare and others long before the time of Einstein, and one does injustice to truth in ascribing the discovery to him." -- Charles Nordmann

While it is certainly true that many people incorrectly attribute work done by Poincare, Gauss, and others, to Einstein, that too does not mean that Einstein's work is plagiarized. Of course he builds on the work of other mathematicians and physicists. If other people mistakenly assume that the work he built on was actually his own work, then that is their mistake, not plagiarism. After all, it is not as though Einstein fraudulently claimed that he came up with all of it by himself.

"[Einstein's] paper 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper' in Annalen der Physik. . . contains not a single reference to previous literature. It gives you the impression of quite a new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not true." -- Max Born

Again, not an accusation of plagiarism. Born is pointing out the common misconception that the view prior to Einstein was that "all is well with mechanics", and that nobody was even considering the various inconsistencies between Newtonian mechanics and electrodynamics. People had been trying to reconcile the two for quite some time. Einstein was the first to do so successfully.

"In point of fact, therefore, Poincare was not only the first to enunciate the principle, but he also discovered in Lorentz's work the necessary mathematical formulation of the principle. All this happened before Einstein's paper appeared." -- G. H. Keswani

Also not an indication of plagiarism. Again, this is just pointing out that much of the mathematics which Einstein used to formulate his new theory was already there. Special Relativity is described in terms of the Lorentz transformations, and General Relativity is described in terms of Tensor Calculus. Einstein did not invent either of these mathematical tools. What he did was use them to describe a new theory.

"Einstein's explanation is a dimensional disguise for Lorentz's. . . . Thus Einstein's theory is not a denial of, nor an alternative for, that of Lorentz. It is only a duplicate and disguise for it. . . . Einstein continually maintains that the theory of Lorentz is right, only he disagrees with his 'interpretation.' Is it not clear, therefore, that in this, as in other cases, Einstein's theory is merely a disguise for Lorentz's, the apparent disagreement about 'interpretation' being a matter of words only?" -- James Mackaye

Aside from the fact that this is a misrepresentation of reality, this is also not an accusation of plagiarism. Rather it is a (fallacious) claim that Einstein's theory does not add anything of substance to Lorentz's theory. This is, of course, completely false. Lorentz's theory did not make the same predictions and Einstein's theory.



Dr. Stupid