Insubstantial arguments for Einstein's priority

In response to a book review, John Bonaccorsi gave an assortment of arguments for crediting Einstein for special relativity. Here is an outline. You can check the source for details.

Lorentz and Poincare were holding to — or, at least, not clearly breaking from — the idea of a “real” cosmic-coordinate system, in which light was propagated in a stationary ether.

Lorentz and Poincare never said that there was a cosmic coordinate system, Einstein never said that there was no cosmic coordinate system, and there is no explanation of why the issue would have any physical significance.

while he (Lorentz) was attempting to make sense of his experimental results with the concept of “local time,” Einstein understood that these and other results were a reflections of the very nature of time.

Lorentz and Einstein did use slightly different terminology. Lorentz used “local time” in 1895. Einstein’s 1905 term was “time of the stationary system”. Einstein’s 1905 time used the same definitions and formulas as had been previously used by Lorentz and Poincare. Einstein did not understand that time was the fourth dimension and that time can be understood to have a geometrical relationship to the three spatial dimensions. That is one of the chief lessons of special relativity, and Einstein missed it entirely.

Do you know who first brought attention to that 1905 article? It was Max Planck.

Yes, Planck was the journal editor who accepted the paper, and he wrote a couple of relativity papers himself. Maybe he was even partial to German scientists. But he never said that Einstein's work was any better than that of Lorentz and Poincare.

Let’s take a look at the first paragraph ... “It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics ...”

Einstein is being gracious when he says that that asymmetry is “known.” He was the only person on Earth who was bothered by it.

The asymmetry was described in common textbooks and was solved by Lorentz transformations. That is why they are called Lorentz transformations and not Einstein transformations.

Lorentz: ... “I did not indicate the transformation which suits best. That was done by Poincaré and then by Mr. Einstein and Minkowski....”

Yes, Lorentz credited Poincare over Einstein. So did everyone else who read Poincare.

Lorentz: “[T]he chief difference [is] that Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced,...”

Yes, that is the chief difference between Einstein's 1905 paper and the previous published papers of Lorentz and Poincare.

“Poincaré’s reaction to Einstein’s 1905 paper was rather strange. When Poincaré lectured in Göttingen in 1909 on relativity he did not mention Einstein at all...”

To a mathematician like Poincare, postulating someone else's theorems is a trivial thing to do. Poincare had no need to cite someone who merely postulated a result in an expository paper; he would cite the man who actually proved it previously.

Poincare: “Perhaps … we should construct a whole new mechanics, of which we only succeed in catching a glimpse, where inertia increasing with the velocity, the velocity of light would become an impassable limit....”

That is what Poincare said in his 1904 St. Louis lecture, and he was exactly correct. Relativity was the new mechanics.

The most striking thing about these pro-Einstein arguments is how the Einstein idolizers are dogmatically persistent with insubstantial arguments. I don't blame John as he is just repeating the conventional wisdom of the Einstein fans. They use phrases like “greatest physicist that ever lived” based largely on the originality of the 1905 relativity paper, and yet they cannot point to any formula, mathematical argument, or physical consequence that was new. They base their idolotry entirely in insubstantial arguments about minor differences in terminology, and a belief that no one could have been as smart as Einstein.