Monday, March 23, 2020

Poincare bio essay credits Einstein

One of the strange things about Albert Einstein is how everyone goes out of his way to credit him, whether appropriate or not.

For example, you would think that an essay about Poincare, or any other scientist, would just mention what he did, and not bother crediting others who are not the subject of the essay. That is usually the case, except when it relates to Einstein.

If any essay mentions someone's contribution to relativity, it always makes a point of saying that it was inferior to Einstein's contribution. I don't think I have ever seen any exception.

Here is Henri Poincaré: a short intellectual biography:
Poincaré was also interested in the philosophical debate on time measurement, stemming from practical work on determination of longitude and his and scientific interest in electromagnetic and optical phenomena. He introduced the idea of relative motion and the rejection of Newtonian absolute time by recognising that the measurement of duration or simultaneity involves the introduction of convention. Many have been fascinated about the relationship between Poincaré and Einstein and how much the special theory of relativity was conceived by the former. His 1906 lectures On the Limits of the Law of Newton engages with the laws of relativity. While his discovery of the Lorentz group made the ether irrelevant, Poincaré's search for dynamical solution to the observed Lorentz contractions and dilations prevented him from going as far as Einstein into the theory of relativity.
Note the last sentence says Poincare's relativity was inferior to Einstein's.

The sentence doesn't even make any sense. Einstein said he looked for a dynamical solution to the contractions. The dynamical explanation was Lorentz's, not Poincare's.

Einstein didn't really get any farther into relativity while Poincare was alive. Einstein did get farther after Poincare died. But even if Einstein did discover something that Poincare didn't know, why is it so important to mention? The essay mentions many other Poincare contributions, but does not describe any of them as inferior to those of others.

I believe that this is the result of the influence of an Einstein cult. It is harder to say why Einstein is worshiped so much.

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