Another Galina Weinstein Rebuttal

Einstein scholars have been giving bogus arguments for decades to prop up his reputation for relativity. One of the worst offenders is Galina Weinstein. I have criticized her many times, most recently here.

Now Jean-Marc Ginoux has written a rebuttal to her criticism of his Poincare book.

Unfortunately, Weinstein’s review of my book contains a number of mistakes, falsehoods and misleading criticisms that I would like to point out here. To this aim, I will follow the structure of Weinstein’s paper and show section by section all the erroneous historical facts she has reported.

Weinstein accepts Einstein's lies:

Here, the conflict of interest is obvious since the only witness on which these claims are based is Einstein himself. So, we must believe him according to Galina Weinstein because Einstein necessarily always tells the truth. This is unfortunately not the case and the biographies (see Albert Einstein Demystified, Ginoux [10]) I wrote on Einstein demonstrate this. Indeed, Einstein, like many others, lied to his wife, his children and also to his colleagues. So, why should we believe what he says about this article? Sorry but this is clearly not enough.

The takedown is brutal. I mainly argued that Weinstein's biggest arguments were demonstrably false. Ginoux details her minor claims, and finds most of them to be false also.

Most historians do credit Einstein for special relativity, and I wonder how they get away with it. Their arguments are fallacious and they ignore the hard evidence. Most of what they say is just nonsense. She is a professor at an Israel university, so maybe she never hears any Einstein criticism. She relies on Einstein historian John Stachel, who was well-trained in Communist doubletalk.

It is very surprising to observe for decades how some historians of science are able not to reconstruct but really to rewrite the development of the theory of special relativity by inventing imaginary facts or by interpreting real facts in a incredible manner. I think that the paper of Galina Weinstein is one of the best examples of what can be done in this case and it should be used to learn how to recognize fake news. ...

The third type of argument is more dangerous but very classical: "the falsehoods". As an example, she explains that in his contribution entitled "La mesure du temps" Poincaré [22] already used the concept of luminiferous ether although even the expression does not appear in this paper as it is easy to verify. ...

Here appears a new kind of argument: "same but different". Poincaré and Einstein’s results seem to be the same but they are different. Why? This is not crystal clear.

The same-but-different argument is a real head-scratcher. At best it would only show that Einstein had an improved interpretation of the previously published Lorentz-Poincare theory. But the Einstein fans would never be happy only crediting him for that.

As an example, she quotes Stachel about Einstein:

the ether he reintroduced differed fundamentally from the ether he had banished [Sta-01].

If that is their story, they should stop saying Einstein abolished the aether, and instead say he had some different subtle philosophical interpretation of it.

It is very regrettable that some historians of science are capable of using such methods to defend an indefensible point of view which does not stand up to analysis of the facts. Let us recall to them Poincaré’s words:

Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be [27].

I wonder if Weinstein will respond to these criticisms. She has aggressively attacked other scholars who did not adequately credit Einstein. Here she stands accused of "a complete misunderstanding of the theory of special relativity". as well as misrepresenting the original sources.

In my view, the different presentations of special relativity are not all the same. Einstein's is more or less the same as Lorentz's, and Minkowski's is essentially the same as Poincare's. The Poincare-Minkowski version became the canonical one, after about 1910.

Update: The Ginoux rebuttal is also posted here.