New Ginoux Book credits Poincare for Relativity

The Einstein scholars cannot tolerate anyone but Einstein getting credit for relativity, and now Galina Weinstein has just posted:

Jean-Marc Ginoux's recent book, "Poincaré, Einstein and the Discovery of Special Relativity: An End to the Controversy" (2024), seeks to close the debate over the respective roles of Poincaré and Einstein. Yet what is presented as an "end" may instead invite a more careful analysis of how similar equations can conceal divergent conceptions. The aim here is not to rehearse priority disputes but to show how Einstein's ether-free, principle-based kinematics marked out a path that, unlike its contemporaries, became the canonical form of special relativity.

The book abstract:

1905 is probably the best-known year in physics, since it was the year of the discovery of the special theory of relativity. For decades, historiography has told us that Albert Einstein, then a patent examiner in Bern, succeeded in developing this theory on his own, overcoming all the difficulties that the greatest scientists of his time had not been able to solve. However, some have pointed out that, before Einstein’s first publication in this field, the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré had obtained the same results, which he had published several months before Einstein. Yet today, this theory is known as Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Thus, considering the indisputable anteriority of Poincaré’s contributions, there is only one real question that needs to be answered: Why didn’t Poincaré claim the authorship of special theory of relativity? After recapping on the ideas and concepts of the special theory of relativity in a manner accessibleto non-specialists and recalling the historical context of the discovery of this theory, we will answer this question and thus put finally an end to this long-running controversy.

He wrote this rebuttal, also here, to a negative review.

The book points out that Poincare had the entire theory of special relativity, with all the equations and physical consequences, in 1905, with a short summary, a long paper, and private letters to Lorentz. These were finished and submitted long before Einstein submitted his famous 1905 paper. The summary was even published and in a university library available to Einstein, while he was writing that famous paper.

Most of this is well-known, as Whittaker's 1951 book said that Lorentz and Poincare had the whole theory before Einstein. Einstein was shown the book while he was still alive, and he had no rebuttal. His friend Max Born tried for three years to persuade Whittaker of Einstein's originality, but ultimately decided that Whittaker was right. Wikipedia says the book was well-received, but no one wanted to cite it out of fear of the Einstein controversy.

Weinstein cannot deny any of these facts, but she concocts goofy arguments on why Einstein should be credited anyway. She cites his 1955 denials that he knew about important works by Lorentz and Poincare, but admits that there is strong evidence that he relied on some of them.

She attacks Poincare:

And yet, a few years later, in his 1912 London lecture, he was speaking the idiom of Minkowski space and edging toward Einstein’s own perspective.

In his London lecture of May 1912, Poincaré spoke of a “révolution en physique.” No ether was invoked. Instead, he described how a sphere for one observer becomes an ellipsoid for another, how simultaneity dissolves once observers move with respect to each other, and how time itself interlaces with space as a fourth dimension — mathematically rotated by Lorentz transformations. One even hears the unmistakable echo of Minkowski in his remark that the fourth coordinate is best taken as t√−1. Finally, he underlined that in this nouvelle mécanique, causal influence can propagate no faster than light, so that certain pairs of events can stand in no relation of cause and effect at all [Poi12].

Read in isolation, the passage might almost pass for a lecture by Einstein himself — save for the French accent and the courtesy of quotation marks. By then, however, Einstein had already made simultaneity operational, abandoned the ether, and embraced Minkowski’s geometry. The irony is hard to miss: Ginoux asks why Poincaré never claimed authorship of relativity [Gin], yet Poincaré’s own words, in the last public address of his life, sound less like a claimant and more like a convert. The revolution, it seems, was already underway — only the naming rights remained unspoken.

No, using t√-1 as the fourth coordinate was invented by Poincare and described explicitly on p.168 of his long 1905 paper. Minkowski first used it in his 1907 paper, and he cites Poincare. Poincare was giving his own 1905 perspective, and not edging towards Einstein's perspective.

It is baffling how Weinstein could make a mistake like this. She has spent most of her career writing about 20 papers and 3 books crediting Einstein over Lorentz and Poincare for relativity, and she attacks Poincare for copying Minkowski for an idea that was plainly original to Poincare and copied by Minkowski. Einstein resisted Minkowski's approach for years and never credited Poincare.

Her papers mostly consist of burying the reader with technical details from original documents, so he will accept her pro-Einstein opinions as authoritative.

As you can see here, the idea of using imaginary time as the fourth spacetime coordinate was invented by Poincare, copied by Minkowski two years later, and reluctantly accepted by Einstein years after that, and she thinks that Poincare was just trying to sound like Einstein!

The book addresses the question of why there was not more of a public priority dispute between Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein. Poincare generously credited Lorentz, and explained how their theories differed. Lorentz credited Einstein for some insights, but argued that Einstein mainly just postulated what Lorentz and Poincare proved. Einstein almost never credited anyone for anything, and could never explain how his theory was any different or better than those of Lorentz and Poincare.

Poincare did recommend Lorentz for a Nobel Prize for his 1895 invention of relativistic time. Lorentz did get the prize in 1902, but the citation only mentioned electrodynamics and not his use of time specifically. According to the book, and Weinstein, Poincare did write, in support of himself being nominated for a Nobel Prize:

I have published an article in Rendiconti in which I explain the theory of Lorentz on the Dynamics of the Electron and in which I believe I have succeeded in removing the last difficulties and giving it perfect coherence.

This was the 9th of 13 scientific accomplishments, being considered for the prize. So he did claim credit for perfecting special relativity, if a Nobel Prize were given for it. If he perfected it before Einstein and Minkowski wrote anything on the subject, then I take this as a clear priority claim.

Ginoux and Weinstein are puzzled by these two questions: (1) Why didn't Poincare publicly claim credit for relativity; and (2) Why is it that, when Poincare gave a dozen or so public lectures about relativity, he generously credited Lorentz and those coming before him, but never mentioned Einstein, Minkowski, and those who came after? And why did he teach his own version of relativity, rather than that of Einstein or Minkowski?

These questions answer themselves. Poincare publicly lectured on relativity as his theory, derived from Lorentz, and he got no part of his theory from Einstein and Minkowski. Not mentioning the plagiarists was the gentleman-scholar thing to do. There was no need to get into any arguments, as Poincare published it all in widely read journals and books. The proof was there for anyone who bothers to look.

She and the above reviewer argue that Poincare should not be credited with a new theory because he only claimed to be perfecting Lorentz's theory, while Einstein was boldly not crediting Lorentz or Poincare. This is exactly backwards. Poincare credits Lorentz and then boldly claims a new theory which is different in the way that Copernicus was different from Ptolemy. See this page of his 1905 long paper. By contrast, Einstein does not explain how his theory is any different from Lorentz's 1895 theory, as improved in 1904. Einstein derives it from postulates instead of experiments, but the resulting theory is the same, and others called it Lorentz-Einstein theory.  So it was Poincare who boldly claimed a new theory, not Einstein.

Her most outrageous claim is:

Einstein’s ether-free, principle-based kinematics marked out a path that, unlike its contemporaries, became the canonical form of special relativity.

This is completely false. The canonical form of special relativity is the one with the Lorentz group, Minkowski spacetime, 4-vectors, non-euclidean metric, covariant equations, and Michelson-Morley experiment. All of these are absent from Einstein's 1905 paper. We get them from Poincare's 1905 papers.

She argues:

Yet the resemblance of formulas should not obscure the difference of foundations. The decisive difference lies not in whether both men spoke of rods, clocks, or signals, but in what they did with them. Poincaré preserved the ether, corrected Lorentz’s electron theory within electrodynamics, and treated local time as a useful fiction; Einstein discarded the ether, made simultaneity operational, and showed that the space and time transformations express a new conception of space and time.

All of that is false. It was Poincare, not Einstein, who said the aether was a convenient and unnecessary hypothesis. Lorentz and Einstein said the same thing about the aether. It was Poincare, not Einstein, who combined space and time into 4D spacetime. It was Poincare who published operational simutaneity in 1898, and she admits Einstein copied that. It was Poincare, not Einstein, who argued in 1905 that relativity applied beyond electrodynamics and into gravity.

She ends with this crazy analogy for crediting Einstein:

One suspects that, had he been listening, Einstein would have let the discussion run its course before offering only a shrug and the reminder that equations, like jokes, are all in the telling.

So Einstein plagiarized the whole special relativity theory, but somehow told the story better? Not even that is true, as everyone in 1910 preferred Minkowski's account, not Einstein's.

Ginoux wrote a sharp rebuttal to an earlier bad review, so I wonder if he will write another. Weinstein deserves someone criticizing her, besides me. I have posted many criticisms of her, most recently here.