Einstein Lied about his Statistical Mechanics Sources

Hector Giacomini writes a new paper comparing Einstein's work on statistical mechanics to the previous American work by J.W. Gibbs:

This article reexamines the striking conceptual and formal parallels between Josiah Willard Gibbs Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics and Albert Einstein first paper on statistical mechanics. Although their derivations follow different paths, both arrive at the canonical distribution and construct closely related theoretical frameworks for thermal equilibrium. ... Drawing on new archival evidence concerning the rapid European dissemination of Gibbs book in the spring of 1902, the article reassesses the plausibility of Einstein later claim that he was unaware of Gibbs work at the time.

Einstein said he was unaware of the Gibbs book, so we should take his word for it, right?

The historiographical reassessment proposed in this article also invites a broader reflection on Einstein's own representation of theoretical work and on the public image of the theoretical physicist that he actively helped to shape. In several retrospective and public writings, Einstein portrayed theoretical physics as an activity that is largely solitary in character, carried out at some distance from academic routines, collective research programmes, and institutional frameworks. This representation placed particular emphasis on inward intellectual work, conceptual synthesis, and intuition, rather than on cumulative traditions or collaborative practices.

Einstein lied all his life about the origin of relativity.

The long-term effects of this narrative construction extend well beyond Einstein's own writings. For more than a century, special relativity has been taught largely through the conceptual and rhetorical framework established by Einstein himself. In the vast majority of university textbooks, Lorentz appears primarily as an eponym attached to a set of coordinate and time transformations, while his broader physical programme, heuristic motivations, and sustained engagement with the foundations of electrodynamics are largely absent. The historical role of Lorentz is thus reduced to a formal label, and the complex prehistory of special relativity is compressed into a minimal backdrop against which Einstein's theory appears as an almost inevitable conceptual resolution. This pedagogical canonisation has reinforced a de-historicised understanding of the theory's origins and has contributed to the enduring marginalisation of alternative narratives emphasising continuity, collective development, and the cumulative structure of theoretical physics at the turn of the 20th century.

A similar pattern can be identified in Einstein's work on molecular physics. In his 1905 paper on Brownian motion and in his doctoral thesis on molecular dimensions, Einstein made no reference to the work of William Sutherland (1859–1911), despite documentary evidence that Sutherland's ideas were discussed in his immediate intellectual environment. In particular, the correspondence between Einstein and Michele Besso in 1903 explicitly refers to Sutherland's hypothesis in connection with molecular dimensions, viscosity, diffusion, and the applicability of hydrodynamic laws at the molecular scale.54 Sutherland had developed a research programme linking molecular forces, viscosity, diffusion, and osmotic pressure, with the aim of using macroscopic transport phenomena as probes of molecular size and mass. ...

These cases suggest that the silence surrounding sources and influences in Einstein's early work was neither accidental nor confined to a single episode. Rather, it reflects a consistent mode of presentation in which theoretical advances were framed as emerging primarily from individual reasoning and intuition. This narrative strategy does not accurately reflect Einstein's actual scientific practice, which remained embedded in dense networks of reading, correspondence, and discussion. Instead, it functioned as a symbolic resource in the construction of a public image of theoretical physics as a solitary enterprise.

Einstein lied all his life, to his colleagues, his readers, his wife, and everyone else.

Einstein knew about 1904 Relativity Papers

Hector Giacomini has written three recent papers on the history of special relativity, here, here, and here.

He has now revised Lorentz, Poincare, Einstein, and the Genesis of the Theory of Special Relativity and Henri Poincare Saint Louis Lecture of 1904: Publication, Dissemination, and Historiographical Implications, apparently as a result of reviewer comments. The main differences are that he has more evidence for what Einstein knew, and when he knew it.

Arguments for Einstein's originality depend on assuming that he was unaware of relativity papers published by Lorentz and Poincare in 1904. This is made plausible by the image of Einstein as a lone genius working in Bern Switzerland isolation.

The central result of this article may therefore be stated simply: availability is not influence, but without reconstructing availability the problem of influence is historically ill posed. The evidence presented here makes it difficult to sustain any historiography that begins from the tacit assumption that relevant texts by Poincaré and Lorentz were absent from Einstein’s documentary horizon. ..., Einstein appears not as an isolated thinker detached from contemporary literature,

This establishes that Einstein almost certainly knew about the Lorentz and Poincare papers. They were available to him in Bern, and the contents of those papers had been discussed in several other sources that Einstein was likely to have read.

Einstein did not reference these papers in his famous 1905 paper. To me the smoking gun is that he continued to conceal these references in subsequent relativity papers. Even if he did not know about them in May 1905, they were surely pointed out to him later, and an honest scholar would have cited them.

Apparently the pro-Einstein referees required Giacomini to add this:

Einstein’s originality remains profound: his 1905 paper reorganized the electrodynamics of moving bodies around synchronization, simultaneity, the relativity principle, and the constancy of the velocity of light in a way that differed conceptually from Lorentz’s electron theory and from Poincaré’s formulation.

The synchronization, simultaneity, and relativity principle are straight from Poincare's papers from several years earlier. In later interviews, Einstein admitted that he got the constancy of the velocity of light from Lorentz.

So the alleged originality is only in the way these ideas are organized. Lorentz and Poincare deduced them from the Michelson-Morley and other experiments. Einstein did not mention Michelson, but only the consequences.

Recent interview:

I mean when we think about Einstein developing uh relativity theory his special theory in 1905 the mathematics for that was pretty much sorted out. people you know like Lorentz and Poincare had already developed the equations. What they didn't have was the correct interpretation. what is this telling us about reality Einstein comes along he doesn't come up with new mathematics; he comes up with the correct interpretation.

the narrative the explanation of what this theory is telling us about the world you know that nothing can go faster than light, that time and space must be unified into 4D space time. so the interpretation Einstein's then credited with relativity theory. It's the interpretation the explanation that's important.

No, Einstein's interpretation was essentially the same as Lorentz's. The "correct interpretation" as 4D spacetime is from Poincare and Minkowski, not Einstein.

The case against Galileo

Galileo is considered one of the great heroes of modern science. Supposedly he discovered the acceleration of gravity, the telescope, the moons of Jupiter, the relativity of motion, and heliocentrism.

Most of all, he is praised for standing up to the Pope in Rome.

Supposedly also, he discovered the experimental method. Before him, everyone blindly accepted what was written, if it came from Aristotle or the Bible. He was the first to have the courage to challenge them, and put ideas to an empirical test.

He is also sometimes credited with mathematizing science. He would deduce physical principles from pure thought, logic, math, and thought experiments. This belief is in tension with the belief that he was a great empiricist.

Wikipedia says:

Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy,[9] modern-era classical physics,[10] the scientific method,[11] and modern science.[12]

Yes, Galileo really gets this gushing praise from historians and philosophers. It is all absurd.

I just discovered this 2020 podcast:

Galileo is the most overrated figure in the history of science. That is the thesis of Season 1 of my podcast, which consists of the following 18 episodes. ...

Galileo is praised for his work on falling bodies, but his arguments were dishonest and his trifling discoveries were not new. ...

Galileo committed scores of errors in his physics. These are bad in themselves and also undermine Galileo’s claim to credit for the things he did get right.

Galileo dismissed the notion that the moon influences the tides as “childish” and “occult.” Instead he argued that tides are a kind of sloshing due to the motion of the earth. This very poor theory is inconsistent with several of his own scientific principles.

Two thousand years before Galileo, Greek astronomers argued that the heavenly bodies revolve around the sun. Their reasoning involved sophisticated mathematics and sound physical considerations.

Galileo is credited with defeating Ptolemaic earth-centered astronomy, but most mathematical astronomers had already abandoned this theory long before Galileo.

The podcast thoroughly debunks the idea that Galileo was a great scientist. He got a lot of stuff wrong.

In particular, his main argument for heliocentrism was that the motion of the Earth caused the ocean tides. His theory was that there was one high tide per day. In fact there are two high tides per day, and it had been known for centuries that the Moon caused the tides. Also the Sun, if it is aligned.

Couldn't he just walk down to the beach and see for himself? Actually that is not so simple, as the Mediterranean is mostly an enclosed sea, and the tides are small and confusing.

Galileo is credited with an assortment of other things, and it is nearly all bogus. He did describe the moons of Jupiter, but only one day ahead of a German. He supposedly discovered Newton's first law of motion, that an object goes with constant velocity, in the absence of forces. But he only believed this for horizontal motion.

He used inclined planes to measure the acceleration of gravity, but his answer was off by a factor of two.

Listening to this podcast makes me wonder why Galileo was revered so much. Do people think his existence disproves Catholicism? I am not sure.

The craziest thing is not the overcrediting of Galileo, but the way the historians and philosophers argue that no one before Galileo tested ideas empirically, no one tried to observe the world, and no one tried to mathematize nature. Actually, these things had been done for millennia. The ancients created Astronomy models, built ships and pyramids, invented Geometry, and a lot of other great things. Of course they used observation, math, theory, and science.

The story reminds me about how lots of people credit Christopher Columbus for discovering the Earth being round. That is stupid on two levels. First, the roundness of the Earth was well-known to scholars for two millennia. Second, the claim does not even make any sense, as Columbus did not go around the Earth, but merely sailed to some islands and back.

Likewise, scholars have been doing science and mathematizing nature for millennia. And Galileo was not even a very good scientist, compared to his contemporaries. The work by Tycho and Kepler was 100x better than anything Galileo did. It was vastly superior in its empiricism and its mathematization, the two things that cause historians to idolize Galileo.

Notes on Minkowski's Geometric Relativity

Einstein scholar Tilman Sauer writes a new paper:

Minkowski's Geometric Explanation of Lorentz Contraction

Hermann Minkowski's original explanation of relativistic length contraction using a space-time diagram and conic section geometry of a standard hyperbola is reconstructed on the basis of unpublished manuscript notes dated to the spring of 1908. The manuscript notes likely reflect Minkowski's preparation of a lecture to physics and mathematics teachers. They reveal Minkowski as an educator as well as a promoter of a mathematization of the physical sciences. I also comment on his interpretation of Einstein's work and on the use of language in his popularization of mathematics.

He did not find anything particularly interesting in the notes.

It is not clear that Einstein's work had much influence on Minkowski, if any.

He mentions Einstein’s work on the relativity principle as a continuation of Lorentz’s work. ...

He did not identify the principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of the speed of light as the two defining principles for the special theory of relativity. Instead, he singled out Lorentz’s contraction hypothesis as a fundamental postulate, and the existence of a limiting velocity as an axiom. ...

He then stated his impression that Einstein had not yet achieved “full understanding of the facts” (“volle Einsicht der gegebenen Tatsachen”).

Minkowski mentions crediting Einstein for this:

Lorentz himself told me in a conversation in Rome that Einstein’s merit is to have recognized that the time of one electron is just as good as that of the other, i.e. to have recognized the equivalence of t and t′.

That may be Einstein's merit, but Lorentz surely understood that in 1895, because he used it to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment. And Poincare believed that Lorentz understood it, because it was part of the recommendation for Lorentz to get the 1902 Nobel Prize.

The whole point of the Lorentz 1895 theory was that Maxwell's equations held in the moving frame, for the transformed coordinates. For that to work, the transformed time has to be genuine time in the moving frame. Perhaps Lorentz was missing some conceptual details, but he had to believe that what he called "local time" was the locally observed time.

Discussion of Poincare is strangely absent. Minkowski wrote two papers on relativity, citing Poincare prominently in the first but not the second. Some of Minkowski work, such as the 4d spacetime, indefinite metric, and Lorentz covariance, appear to be straight out of Poincare. Minkowski died shortly afterwards, so we got no more explanation.

Sauer is loyal to Einstein, as evidenced by:

Minkowski knew about and cited Einstein’s famous paper from 1905 on the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (3), which introduced the special theory of relativity.

It is pretty clear that Minkowski would not have said that Einstein introduced the theory. If anyone, it was Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski.

Update: I happened to see a 2013 Sauer paper:

As is well-known,12 Einstein’s attempts to obtain an assistantship any- where failed flatly despite various letters of application. To make matters more difficult, Einstein and his fellow student Mileva Mari´c had fallen in love and, unfortunately, Mari´c had become pregnant in the spring of 1901, an unplanned circumstance that surely contributed to her failing the final examinations again at her second attempt in summer 1901. ...

Since Einstein now had a tenured job, he was able to marry Mileva Mari´c in January 1903.

This is such a strange way of describing the situation. The daughter Lieserl is believed to have been abandoned. He could have married and taken responsibility for the child, even without a tenured job.

The 1969 Book that Killed AI Research

The neural nets at the core of AI were invented in 1943, and popularized in 1957-60 as the Perceptron. It had the basic idea that was later developed into today's AI LLMs.

But not everyone recognized it. Prominent MIT professors wrote a 1969 book, Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, trashing the concept.

Reports by the New York Times and statements by Rosenblatt claimed that neural nets would soon be able to see images, beat humans at chess, and reproduce. ...

This book is the center of a long-standing controversy in the study of artificial intelligence. It is claimed that pessimistic predictions made by the authors were responsible for a change in the direction of research in AI, concentrating efforts on so-called "symbolic" systems, a line of research that petered out and contributed to the so-called AI winter of the 1980s, when AI's promise was not realized.

The book claimed to prove that perceptrons were hopelessly limited, as they could not even approximate a simple xor function.

The authors doubled down in 1988 updated edition, saying "little of significance [has] changed since 1969". At the time there was a revival of interest in neural nets, but the authors said they would fail to scale up.

We now know that those neural nets of the 1940s, 50s, and 80s do scale up, and perform spectacularly well. The bold predictions of the perceptron inventor must have been seen as wildly optimistic at the time, but they turned out to be correct.

I post this as an example of how smart people can be wrong about what is possible, and how brilliant research could be sidetracked.

Rosenblatt made a hardware computer perceptron in 1960, and that is now in the Smithsonian Museum. What no one knew until about 2012 was that video game chips would be the key to scaling up neural nets. [date corrected]

Here is a recent video that tries to relate these old ideas about neural nets to current research.

Foundations of General Relativity

The foundational principles of general relativity are said to be the equivalence principle, and general covariance. This new video disagrees.

Here is how I see it. The equivalence principle could also said to be foundational to Newtonian classical gravity, and it is only associated with general relativity for historical reasons.

General covariance is a mathematical principle, and it is not clear that any mathematical principle, by itself, has any physical consequences. As Einstein is quoted:

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

The laws of math do have consequences, but they require interpretation.

We normally say that Euclidean geometry has physical consequences, but that is only because of some assumptions about how idealized points, lines, planes, etc. correspond to physical entities.

Historically, covariance under Lorentz transformation was crucial to the presentations of relativity given by Poincare in 1905 and Minkowski in 1907. Einstein had a weaker version that was more similar to what Lorentz published in 1895.

Einstein was unconvinced, and wrote a paper denouncing the concept in 1913. Eventually, Grossmann, Levi-Civita, Ricci, and Hilbert convinced him to accept it.

The main ideas behind relativistic covariance had already been published by Poincare and Minkowski, but they were dead by the time Einstein worked on general relativity

I believe that general covariance is a crucially important concept. It is a way of saying that the laws do not depend on coordinates. That different frames can be used to the same effect. These ideas go right to the core of why the theory is called relativity. And historically, covariance was a large part of why relativity was accepted. By 1908 it was widely accepted, even though Einstein did not.

Einstein's Friend Wrote a Relativity Paper

Hector Giacomini writes a new paper:

This note examines an apparently unpublished manuscript on special relativity written by Conrad Habicht in 1914 and made available online by the ETH-Bibliothek Zürich in December 2024. To the best of my knowledge, no study of its content has yet been published. Habicht was one of Einstein's closest companions during the Bern years. ...

The manuscript offers a clear and pedagogical presentation of special relativity.

Habicht was a friend of Einstein before 1905, so this might have given insights on where Einstein got his relativity ideas. Unfortunately it does not.

Habicht’s manuscript is much closer to the 1907 exposition than to the original 1905 paper. The 1905 article is remarkably austere in its historical framing: it begins with the magnet-and-conductor asymmetry, formulates the two postulates, defines simultaneity, and proceeds directly to the transformation laws and their consequences. It contains no historical reconstruction of Lorentz’s theory, no explicit discussion of the Michelson–Morley experiment, and no narrative account of the ether problem. The 1907 review article, by contrast, restores much of this background. It places special relativity within the history of the conflict between the Galilean principle of relativity, Maxwell–Lorentz electrodynamics, the stationary ether, negative optical experiments, and Lorentz’s work....

Habicht’s manuscript shows that, within a circle personally close to Einstein, special relativity could be presented through the more historical, Lorentz-centered, and electrodynamical framework that Einstein himself had adopted only two years after the 1905 paper. This manuscript reminds us that the history of special relativity was not transmitted only through the paper of 1905, but also through later acts of exposition, recollection, simplification, and reorganization.

When Lorentz's work is presented, it is really hard to understand what Einstein did that was original. In 1907, the theory was known as Lorentz-Einstein theory.

There is no reference to Poincare. This is bizarre, as it is known that Habicht and Einstein read and discussed some of Poincare's papers before 1905. Poincare's 1904-05 relativity papers were widely read in Europe. It is likely that Einstein knew about them in 1905. Even if he did not, he certainly knew in 1907, and Habicht knew in 1914.

The above paper says "the history of special relativity was not transmitted only through the [Einstein] paper of 1905". That 1905 paper was not even historically very significant. Much more important were Lorentz's 1895 and 1904 papers, Poincare's 1898-1905 papers, and Minkowski's 1907-08 papers. Special relativity as we know it came from those papers, and almost nothing came from Einstein's 1905 paper.

I think this Habicht paper is mostly interesting for what it does not say. If Einstein had some of the main ideas behind special relativity before Lorentz and Poincare published them, then Habicht would be the most likely witness. This Habicht paper could have credited Einstein with having some of the ideas before 1905. It does not. It is only known that Einstein told Habicht he was preparing a paper that “provides a new conception of time and space,” in May 1905.

Giacomini wrote other papers on relativity history, discussed here and here. The first paper was just updated.

Distinguishing Newton's First and Second Laws

Isaac Newton's three laws of motion are: (1) if F = 0 then a = 0; (2) F = ma; (3) actions have reactions.

The first law is a trivial consequence of the second. Why did Newton bother to state it as a separate law?

A new paper answers the question:

On the independence problem of Newton's first law Ido Yavetz, Ehud Aharoni Newton's laws of motion pose an apparent problem, sometimes referred to as "the independence problem": the first law seems to be a simple consequence of the second law, raising the question of why it was included as a separate law. Numerous answers to this question have been proposed in the literature. The main contribution of this paper is a novel answer which we call "the formal explanation." Unlike previous accounts it relies on mathematical formalism and argues that the definitions of Euclidean geometry necessitate the inclusion of the first law. We provide evidence in support of this claim. A second contribution is a comprehensive review of previously suggested explanations, which so far have often been treated in a fragmented manner, and a discussion of the plausibility of the various answers.

It turns out that many people have addressed this, and this paper has a new explanation.

Roughly, mathematicians did not always treat zero as a number. There are many examples in Euclid's Elements where an argument gets restated for the zero and nonzero cases, when a modern textbook would unify them. This paper shows that Newton's usage is consistent with Euclid's.

Newton did not have vectors either, so he had to state the directional components of F = ma separately. One version of his second law was:

”A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed.”

This is similar to Euclid, as he only wrote about nonzero quantities being proportional.

Special Relativity was Announced in 1904

Relavity historians give 1905 for the theory's origin, but it was really 1904.

Hector Giacomini writes in a new paper, also here:

Henri Poincaré’s Saint Louis lecture, delivered on 24 September 1904 at the International Congress of Arts and Science, occupies a distinctive place in the pre-history of twentieth-century theoretical physics. In this text, Poincaré formulated the principle of relativity in explicit and general terms, not as a narrow empirical rule limited to electrodynamics, but as one of the major guiding principles of mathematical physics. The lecture also offered a principle-based conception of theory centered on invariance, least action, and general theoretical coherence.

Poincare and other great scholars made the trip all the way to St. Louis, Missouri, USA, where the World's Fair was being held. For a month, St. Louis was the center of the world.

The text of the lecture was widely published and distributed in 1904, and an English translation was published in a popular philosophical journal in Jan. 1905. The above paper documents the wide distribution.

Poincare's lecture did not have any formulas, but he clearly had the essence of special relativity.

He wrote two kinds of papers. Technical papers with formulas intended for mathematicians, and papers without formulas intended for a wider audience. He was probably the most widely-read intellectual in Europe. Perhaps some did not appreciate him because he did not attempt to explain the formulas to non-mathematicians.

In explicit and programmatic terms, Poincaré formulated the principle of relativity as follows: the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for an observer at rest and for an observer carried along in uniform translational motion. Consequently, no experiment should allow one to determine whether one is in such uniform motion or not. In the lecture this formulation appears within the canonical list of fundamental principles and is treated on the same conceptual level as energy conservation and the principle of least action.

The relativity principle is not introduced merely as an empirical summary of ether-drift experiments. Rather, Poincaré presents it as a structural requirement increasingly supported by the persistent failure of attempts to detect motion relative to the ether. He discusses in particular the negative results of Michelson-type experiments and emphasizes the remarkable stability of electromagnetic theory under uniform motion. The continued empirical confirmation of null results is interpreted as evidence that the invariance of physical laws under uniform translation may reflect a deep structural property of nature. ...

In this respect, Poincaré’s principle of relativity appears as the explicit crystallization of themes already articulated in his writings [11, 12, 13], and made accessible to German-speaking readers through the 1904 translation of La science et l’hypothèse [14]. Poincaré further analyzes the theoretical devices introduced to preserve this invariance. He discusses Lorentz’s notion of “local time”, obtained by synchronizing clocks through light signals ...

Importantly, Poincaré suggests that the situation may ultimately require a new mechanics in which no velocity could exceed that of light and in which inertia would increase with speed. Such remarks indicate that the principle of relativity is not treated as a peripheral correction within classical mechanics, but as a constraint capable of reshaping its conceptual structure.

Lorentz’s 1904 Theory

An important component of the lecture is Poincaré’s discussion of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz’s recent work. In May 1904 Lorentz had published a major paper [6]. In that work Lorentz presented a refined mathematical formulation of the transformations required to preserve the form of Maxwell’s equations in a moving frame.

Poincaré’s lecture demonstrates that by September 1904 he was fully aware of the structure and implications of Lorentz’s construction. He describes the introduction of local time, the contraction hypothesis — according to which bodies moving through the ether undergo a physical contraction in the direction of motion — and the modification of forces and masses required to reconcile theory with experiment.

The paper makes no mention of Einstein, as he did not write anything on relativity until Summer 1905.

Poincare wrote his great relativity paper in 1905, but his 1904 lecture has the essence: the relativity principle, Lorentz transformations, length contraction, Michelson-Morley, clock synchronization, local time, and a new mechanics where nothing goes faster than light.

Previously I argued that the essence of relativity was the 4D spacetime, Lorentz group, non-euclidean geometry, covariant equations, and extending beyond electromagnetism. Poincare had all these in 1905, and Einstein did not understand them until years later.

Einstein sometimes denied that he knew about Lorentz's 1904 paper and Poincare's 1905 paper, although it is documented that he had access to both before submitting his own 1905 paper. I do not know if he was ever asked about Poincare's St. Louis lecture. It is hard to believe he could have missed it, as it was read by anyone with an interest in Mathematical Physics.

Einstein did not reference Lorentz or Poincare in his famous 1905 relativity paper. Even if he really did not know about these papers, he surely knew about them when he wrote survey papers on relativity a couple of years later.

You could also argue that relativity started in 1895, with Lorentz's paper. He had the approximate Lorentz transformations, Michelson-Morley to second order, local time, length contraction, and relation to Maxwell's equations. Lorentz got the 1902 Nobel Prize for his electromagnetic theory. He did not have the higher order theory he found in 1904, the symmetries as a group, and connecting local time to clock synchronization.

Physics Lifetime: 1820 to 1970

Popular tweet:

Many people don't understand just how brutal diminishing returns in theoretical physics were.

Physics barely existed before 1820. After 1970, there was essentially nothing left to discover.

In 1819 there were probably less than 100 full-time paid physicists in the whole world.

By 2026 there are probably about a million physicists across academia and industry, and that number was already huge in the 1970s when physics sort of "ended" with QCD and electroweak unification.

A small, brave band of gentlemen-scholars and amateurs worked out the most important parts of physical law in the 1800s. People doing it as a hobby!

Today, vast armies of professionals equipped with supercomputers toil away in the quantum gravity dungeon, unable to make progress.

Diminishing returns are brutal.

my point is that the low hanging fruits of physics were all picked in a brief window from about 1820 to 1970.

Before that, it was difficult to get anything done at all, there was no funding

Einstein's Notion of a Principle Theory

Einstein scholar Galina Weinstein

Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit admissible microphysical models, while constructive theories remain provisional and revisable....

In late 1919, following the British eclipse expeditions that confirmed the light-bending prediction of general relativity, Albert Einstein agreed to write an explanatory article for The Times of London. Written in German as “Was ist Relativitätstheorie?” and published in English as “Time, Space, and Gravitation” [7, 8], the article was intended not merely as popularization, but as a methodological clarification of the kind of theory relativity is.

In the essay, Einstein contrasts constructive theories (konstruktive Theorien) with principle theories (Prinziptheorien) [7]. This distinction is not merely classificatory but methodological and epistemological in character [22].

Here is that 1919 Einstein paper:

There are several kinds of theory in physics. Most of them are constructive. These attempt to build a picture of complex phenomena out of some relatively simple proposition. The kinetic theory of gases, for instance, attempts to refer to molecular movement the mechanical thermal, and diffusional properties of gases. When we say that we understand a group of natural phenomena, we mean that we have found a constructive theory which embraces them.

But in addition to this most weighty group of theories, there is another group consisting of what I call theories of principle. These employ the analytic, not the synthetic method. ...

The special relativity theory is therefore the application of the following proposition to any natural process: "Every law of nature which holds good with respect to a coordinate system K must also hold good for any other system K' provided that K and K' are in uniform movement of translation."

The second principle on which the special relativity theory rests is that of the constancy of the velocity of light in a vacuum.

No, relativity was not developed as a principle theory. FitzGerald proposed the relativity length contraction in this 1889 paper:

I have read with much interest Messrs. Michelson and Morley's wonderfully delicate experiment attempting to decide the important question as to how far the ether is carried along by the earth. Their result seems opposed to other experiments showing that the ether in the air can be carried along only to an inappreciable extent. I would suggest that almost the only hypothesis that can reconcile this opposition is that the length of material bodies changes, according as they are moving through the ether or across it, by an amount depending on the square of the ratio of their velocity to that of light. We know that electric forces are affected by the motion of the electrified bodies relative to the ether, and it seems a not improbable supposition that the molecular forces are affected by the motion, and that the size of a body alters consequently.

This appears partly inspired by this 1988 Heaviside paper. That is, solid objects are held together by electromagnetic forces, and those fields were known to be warped by motion. Relativity was the constructive consequence.

The relativity principle that laws holding in K must also hold for K' was essentially what Lorentz proved in 1895.

Einstein seemed to disavow all of this when quantum mechanics was discovered. He was happy to avoid the question of how the FitzGerald contraction works on the molecular level, but refused to accept a quantum theory that did not explain the Heisenberg uncertainty on an atomic level.

It is interesting that in 1919 Einstein was still using 1895 terminology, and not saying that the laws of nature must be in covariant equations, or that the laws must be well-defined on a non-Euclidean manifold.

Weinstein posted some other goofy papers recently, including this on Einstein EPR entanglement, and this comparing Heisenberberg-Schroedinger to the P=NP problem. The Heisenberg and Schroeding theories were mathematically equivalent, but she has a whole paper analogizes them to things that are completely different.

Einstein Ignored the Relativity Experiments

Israel Philosophy professor and Einstein scholar Galina Weinstein posted a new paper:

From Drag to Invariance: The Experimental Pressure Behind Special Relativity

This paper completes a three-part study of Einstein's 1905 special relativity by reconstructing the experimental pressures that shaped his thinking from 1895 to June 1905. ...

In this reconstruction, the 1905 paper does not emerge as a kinematic postulate ex nihilo, but as a principled resolution forced by an interconnected complex of experimental anomalies.

This paper recites the historical evidence for special relativity, but there is little evidence that Einstein paid attention to any of it.

We do know what Einstein relied heavily on Lorentz's 1895 theory, without citing it.

Hendrick Antoon Lorentz advanced an electron theory, extending Maxwell’s electrodynamics. ...

Lorentz sought to preserve the form of Maxwell’s equations under such motion. His approach, known as the theorem of corresponding states, introduced auxiliary quantities that allowed the equations for moving systems to be cast in the same form as those for systems at rest in the ether.

In 1895, as part of a first-order treatment, Lorentz introduced the local time, a mathematical device without physical interpretation in his theory,

Yes, the local time was interpreted as the time for the moving body. That was necessary for Maxwell's equations and the experiments.

Lorentz was missing Poincare synchronization to relate the local times.

The Michelson-Morley experiment is often portrayed in textbooks as a crucial precursor to Einstein’s special relativity, suggesting that Einstein was either directly or indirectly influenced by it. However, Einstein gave varying accounts of its influence on his thinking, sometimes acknowledging it as significant and other times dismissing its role in his development of relativity.

This is not hard to understand. The experiment was crucial for relativity. Einstein correctly acknowledged it as very significant. But Einstein just relied on Lorentz's 1895 account of it, and did not pay much attention to it.

Einstein's 1905 paper was just an expository account of Lorentz's 1895 theorem, plus the Poincare synchronization of 1900 and the higher order Lorentz transformations of 1904. He just assumed that the Maxwell, Lorentz, and Poincare theories were correct, and ignored the experimental evidence. Weinstein has a 43-page paper on the experiments, but they had no influence on Einstein.

There are even physicists and philosophers who credit Einstein with being a great anti-positivist, because he pushed ahead with theories while ignoring experiment. To them, that was the essence of Einstein's brilliance and originality. While Lorentz and Poincare used experiments to justify their theories, Einstein just cherry-picked some principles from them and called them postulates. To accept the theory, you just had to accept the postulates, not the experiments.

Einstein's explanations are confusing because he lied about his sources all his life, and because he did not have much to do with the development and acceptance of special relativity. The theory was worked out by Lorentz and Poincare before Einstein wrote anything, and was popularizd in a geometric form by Minkowski.

This is the latest of dozens of papers and books that Weinstein has written to prop up Einstein's reputation. This one does not mention Poincare. It repeats her hallucinations about the aether. She tries really hard to credit Einstein, but she can never figure out what to credit him for.

New Look at Early Special Relativity Papers

New paper:

Lorentz, Poincare, Einstein, and the Genesis of the Theory of Special Relativity
Hector Giacomini

This work offers a historical reading of the genesis of special relativity by placing the contributions of Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein within their scientific and editorial context. It highlights the importance of the German periodical Beiblatter zu den Annalen der Physik as a key channel for the dissemination of international scientific research. The perspective advanced here is that the true revolution did not lie in special relativity itself, but in Maxwell's electrodynamics. Special relativity thus appears as the necessary expression of a framework already transformed by the universality of the speed of light.

This is a fair review of early relativity publications. I learned a few things. Especially some of the circumstantial evidence that Einstein had access to other relativity papers that he refused to cite.

Einstein's explanation of originality does not make any sense:

Einstein defined his own contribution as having transformed Lorentz’s “local time” into the physical time of a moving inertial frame, thereby elevating a mathematical construction to the status of an empirical quantity. ...

It should be recalled that if Lorentz’s time variable t′ in his 1904 paper were merely an auxiliary mathematical device without physical meaning, it would be impossible to explain the negative results of the Michelson–Morley experiments. Lorentz, moreover, explicitly stated in that work that clocks based on electromagnetic mechanisms in the moving system must run slower.

There were numerous inexplicable failures to acknowledge Poincare's work, by Einstein and others. However there were exceptions, so it is clear that Einstein, Minkowski, and others knew about his work.

Einstein claimed to not know about Lorentz's crucial 1904 paper and Poincare's short 1905 paper, but circumstantial evidence implies he knew about both before submitting his own 1905 relativity paper. They were available in a library that Einstein used regularly, and they had generated a lot of attention.

Even if Einstein somehow missed these papers in June 1905, he certainly knew about them when he wrote review papers later. There can be no excuse for Einstein and others not crediting these papers.

In summary: for Poincaré, relativity is grounded in Maxwell’s theory; for Einstein, it is framed as a general kinematic structure, but in practice still bound to Maxwell’s electrodynamics since the limiting speed is taken from it. The two formulations are therefore logically equivalent, differing only in which statement is postulated and which is derived. ...

One may argue that the true revolution was not special relativity itself, but rather the electrodynamics of Ampère, Faraday, and Maxwell. It was this framework that largely shaped twentieth-century physics. ...

Einstein consistently thought in terms of electrodynamics.

Yes, I agree that the theories are logically equivalent, and that Maxwell should be considered an early founder of special relativity.

Some credit Einstein with elevating special relativity from electrodynamics to a spacetime theory, because he wrote a section on kinematics. However it is really Poincare who did that.

The above paper says Poincare's relativity is grounded in Maxwell theory, but Poincare's 1905 papers explicitly say that it is a spacetime theory, and apply it to gravity without any electromagnetism involved. In the Lorentz-Einstein theory, it is never clear whether the relativistic effects are purely electromagnetic.

By 1905, many German physicists were already referring to a “Lorentz–Einstein theory,” which probably prompted Einstein to restate explicitly his intellectual independence. ...

These examples show that, by the late 1900s, the expression “Lorentz–Einstein” circulated across private correspondence (Planck), major physics journals (Bucherer, Levi-Civita), and popular scientific works (Cohn). Far from being marginal, it indicates that relativity was then widely perceived in Germany as a joint construction, or at least as a theory of shared intellectual parentage between Lorentz and Einstein. By contrast, Poincaré — though a central figure in the same debates — was already largely excluded from this emerging tradition.

By "late 1900s" he must mean 1905-10. The Lorentz-Einstein theory could have been considered just an interpretation of the Maxwell theory.

The above paper does not explain why Poincare was excluded. The record is clear that everyone knew who he was and what he did. He was extremely highly respected. Maybe even the most respected and widely-read scholar in Europe. If someone thought that his work was substandard or inferior or derivative or wrong, he could have said so. No one did.

The paper notes that there is a paper trail showing how Lorentz and Poincare came to their conclusions about relativity, but Einstein's route is more mysterious. He cites no previous works. Some claim that Einstein was inspired in isolation. This paper makes it clear that Einstein had access to good libraries and read the top journals. He was plugged into current research.

If Einstein had some plausible story, that would be worth considering. But he did not. The obvious conclusion is that he got all those ideas from Lorentz and Poincare.

Weinstein Against Einstein Ad Hominems

I criticized Galina Weinstein, and commented on another rebuttal. Now she has posted a 19-page response:

This paper provides a systematic response to the criticisms raised by Jean-Marc Ginoux in response to my review of his book on the history of relativity. Whereas my review was written in a strictly academic manner, Ginoux's commentary intermingles mathematical objections with ad hominem insinuations about both Einstein and me.

She is the one with the ad hominems, as you shall see below. She avoids the biggest criticisms from Ginoux and myself.

Ginoux argues that Einstein’s retrospective statements—such as his 1955 letter to Carl Seelig, in which he wrote that he was unaware of Poincaré’s 1905 note [Bor] — should be dismissed because “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?” [Gin-2]. This reasoning collapses private life into a wholesale claim of intellectual dishonesty.

Methodologically, that is untenable; the personal failings of a scientist cannot be marshalled as evidence against their scholarly testimony. To reduce the question of influence in the genesis of special relativity to judgments about moral character is to leave the historical method for insinuation. As Einstein once remarked, “In the past, it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise, I would have crept further into my shell” [DuHo].1

[footnote] ... There is also a well-documented polemical tradition casting Einstein as dishonest or derivative. ...

The substantive historical debate is, of course, legitimate: Did Einstein, before mid-1905, have direct knowledge of Poincaré’s work on Lorentz invariance? Were his results anticipated, and if so, in what sense? ...

What is not acceptable is to dismiss Einstein’s retrospective testimony by means of personal denigration or to frame the debate in terms that echo long-standing prejudicial tropes.

Einstein was not just dishonest in his personal life. He lied about the origins of relativity his entire life. It is not just that his 1905 relativity paper cited no references, but his followup papers, review papers, interviews, and everything else avoided Poincare. He just mentioned Poincare a couple of times in his whole life. As she says in the footnote, his dishonesty and plagiarism is well-documented.

She has a lot of discussion about the many striking similarities between Einstein and prior Poincare publications. In particular, using light signals to synchronize clocks, and postulating the relativity principle. Scholars disagree on how much was plagiarized. The most compelling point to me is that he never came clean, and tried to explain which Poincare works he used, or to credit Poincare's priority.

Einstein did eventually explain that his relied on Lorentz's 1895 relativity theory, constant speed of light, contraction, analysis of Michelson-Morley, and local time, and denied that he read Lorentz's 1904 paper. Maybe he was telling the truth, although Logunov presents evidence that Einstein read that 1904 paper. Einstein published 21 reviews in a journal that also reviewed Lorentz's paper, so it is hard to see how he could have missed it.

But there is no explanation like this for Poincare. Poincare was possibly the most widely read scientist in all of Europe, and Einstein read French. It is a certainty that Einstein read Poincare's relativity works. Even if Einstein's failure to cite Poincare in 1905 is somehow excusable, there can be no excuse for not crediting him in later papers.

She says that the debate is over whether Einstein knew about Poincare's works, and it is unacceptable to question his integrity. Yes, of course I am going to question his integrity, because that is the only way to answer the question. There is no historian who says Einstein did not know about Poincare's works, and no historian who has any excuse for Einstein not citing Poincare.

Her strangest comment is to say that Einstein's honesty must not be questioned, because it is unacceptable "to frame the debate in terms that echo long-standing prejudicial tropes." Apparently this is a veiled reference to a stereotype of Jews being dishonest plagiarists, and as being parasitic, unoriginal, morally corrupt, and eager to appropriate the achievements and culture of others. For more on this subject, see this essay on how the Nazis considered Jewish Physics inferior to Deutsche Physik.

She works for an Israeli university, and I guess it is her duty to defend the honor of a great Jewish intellectual.

Galison has offered a subtle explanation for Einstein’s style in the 1905 relativity paper. Einstein had been trained in the patent office, where clarity, compression, and originality were paramount. Patent applications never cite prior patents or scientific works, for the very logic of the system demands that the invention stand on its own, free of genealogical entanglements.

I am a patent agent myself, and this is false. Patent applications nearly always cite prior patents and scientific works. The whole point of the application is to show that the invention is different and better than the prior art. Even if an application did not include references, the patent examiner would add them. They are essential.

Ginoux’s argument hinges on Einstein’s use of the word überflüssig (“superfluous”) in his 1905 relativity paper, as if this meant that Einstein only sidestepped the ether rather than abolishing it [Gin-2]. This reading is misleading. In German scientific usage, überflüssig means not “almost unnecessary,” but “dispensable,” “without function,” “obsolete.” When Einstein writes that the introduction of a “light ether” will prove überflüssig, he is saying that the ether is not required to account for electrodynamic phenomena. That is abolition in the strictest physical sense.

That is still essentially the same as Lorentz's 1895 paper saying "It is not my intention ... to express assumptions about the nature of the aether." And Poincare saying in 1889, "Whether the ether exists or not matters little - let us leave that to the metaphysicians". (The word can be spelled aether or ether.)

I think that there is overwhelming evidence of plagiarism, but regardless, the fact remains that Einstein's 1905 paper added nothing to the relativity theory created by Lorentz and Poincare. They had the Lorentz group, 4-vectors, spacetime metric, covariant Maxwell equations, and gravity. Einstein had a lesser theory, similar to what Lorentz had in 1904.

So even if Einstein rediscovered some aspects of relativity independently, he was merely giving a version of a theory that had already been published.

She asks whether Einstein's 1905 results were anticipated? The answer is yes, that everything in that paper was done better in previous publications.

She ends by saying that Poincare did cite Einstein in his last 1912 lecture:

ELECTRON DYNAMICS

more precise, this principle will be verified with more precision." In 1901, H. A. Lorentz had modified his theory so as to account for all observations, including Michelson's. He already used the "Lorentz transformation." The confidence inspired by the equations of the electromagnetic field was so strong that no one thought of correcting them, but rather tackled kinematics and mechanics, imagining that they must be affected by absolute motion in order to compensate for the influence of this motion on the phenomena of electrodynamics. But it is in the 17th volume of the Annales of Physique 1905 that we find Einstein's work on the principle of relativity considered in a methodical manner.

I do not even get the point of most of her arguments. Yes, Poincare acknowledged that Einstein published a paper on relativity. So what?

She starts her paper saying:

the difference between formal structures — equations, group properties, calculational devices — that were indeed available to Lorentz and Poincaré by mid–1905 and the conceptual framework inaugurated by Einstein in June 1905, in which simultaneity is practically defined, the ether is rendered superfluous, and the Lorentz transformation is derived from two coequal postulates. My aim here is not to diminish Poincaré’s formidable contributions; it is to clarify what counts as founding a theory, and to separate reconstruction from documentation.

In what follows, I confine myself to dated publications, manuscripts, and verifiable correspondence. I avoid psychologizing — about Einstein, myself, or any other figure — and I do not treat private life or character judgments as evidence. Priority and influence should be argued from documents, not insinuations.

In his comment, Ginoux challenges my interpretation of Einstein’s independence in 1905 and, in doing so, introduces remarks that go beyond scholarly disagreement. While my review was written in a strictly academic manner, addressing only the content of his book, his reply includes ad hominem statements about both Einstein and me.

No, not really. Her aim is very much to diminish Poincare, and to slander anyone who criticizes Einstein.

If she confined herself to verified sources, then the inescapable conclusion is that Lorentz and Poincare had all of special relativity in 1905. That is what Whittaker concluded in his 1953 book. If she and the other Einstein scholars were to simply describe what Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein published, then I would have no quarrel.

No, she argued that Poincare's understanding was deficient. That he failed to take the decisive step. In the above quote, she argues that Poincare having all the formal structures does not count as founding the theory. And she later insinuates that any disagreement is based on Nazi tropes.

She could have recited what Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein said about the aether, but that would not convince anyone to credit Einstein. She could explain how simultaneity is practically defined, but that would be Poincare's papers of 1898, 1900, and 1904. Likewise, she could have explained how they each derived the Lorentz transformations, but it is not clear why one would be better. Relativity textbooks commonly give other derivations as well. She could explain Einstein's two postulates, but she would have to say that they were published by Lorentz and Poincare years earlier.

So that leaves crediting Einstein for re-deriving the Lorentz transformations "from two coequal postulates", neither of which was original to him. That's all. Poincare had the postulates, but I guess he did not say that they are "coequal", whatever that means.

By comparison, Poincare had the Lorentz group, 4-vectors, spacetime metric, covariant Maxwell equations, and gravity, all in 1905, and all years before Einstein even understood these concepts. The canonical special relativity theory of 1910 until today is the one we got from Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski, not Einstein.

She argues:

The real point of contention is not whether Poincaré made profound contributions — he did — but whether Einstein’s 1905 paper represents merely an echo of those contributions or a decisive reconceptualization. I maintain, in line with much of the existing scholarship ([Nor, Sta02] and others), that Einstein’s achievement lay in relocating the Lorentz transformations into an ether-free, principle-based kinematics.

I thought she was going to say that Einstein founded a new theory. No, he just had a reconceptualization of Poincare's theory. Poincare's theory was also aether-free, so the supposed achievement is the "principle-based kinematics". Poincare's theory was also principle-based. So the difference is that Poincare had a 4D spacetime theory with a Lorentz symmetry group, and Einstein had a kinematic reconceptualization, whatever that is. This is how she, and other Einstein scholars, desperately try to find something original that can be attributed to Einstein, even if it has little to do with special relativity theory.

Galina Weinstein tries to Retrofit Einstein Again

Israeli scholar Galina Weinstein describes herself:

Specialist in Einstein’s Writings & Theories. I specialize in Einstein studies and have published extensively on the topic.

She just posted yet another paper on why Einstein deserves all the credit for special relativity, while Lorentz and Poincare were too stupid to know what they were doing.

Lorentz, Poincaré, and Einstein: Rethinking Doppler, Aberration, and the Fresnel Drag

Galina Weinstein

This paper examines Lorentz's 1895 derivations of the classical Doppler formula and Fresnel drag, Einstein's 1905 derivation of the relativistic Doppler effect and aberration, and Einstein's 1907 kinematical route to the exact velocity composition law from which Fresnel drag is obtained as a low-velocity limit. Einstein acknowledged that he had read Lorentz's "Versuch" well before 1905. In 1907, Einstein identified Lorentz's "Versuch" as a crucial precursor to relativity. In that work, Lorentz had already invoked local time to derive Fresnel's drag coefficient from Maxwell's equations. There is a genuine "family resemblance" between Lorentz's and Einstein's treatments in that both preserve the phase of a plane wave under transformation. Yet I demonstrate that this resemblance is only formal. I also discuss the absence of the relativistic Doppler and aberration laws in Poincaré's Dynamics of the Electron.

So Einstein admitted in 1907 that his famous 1905 relativity paper was based on Lorentz's 1895 Versuch paper. Einstein's 1905 paper closely resembles Lorentz's 1895 paper, as she says, but Einstein did not cite it. In other words, this was flagrant plagiarism.

Nevertheless she finds wacky reasons to ignore the plagiarism and credit Einstein. She cannot deny that Lorentz and Poincare had the whole theory before Einstein, so she has to claim that they somehow did not understand what they were doing.

I have criticized her in the past, most recently here, here, and here, and found her papers riddled with errors, smokescreens, and misrepresentations. She has not responded to these criticisms. She often criticizes other scholars, in Einstein's defense.

She keeps claiming that Einstein took the "decisive step", but she can never put her finger on what that step is.

First, that step is not "that no preferred ether frame exists." Special relativity does not depend on the aether, or lack of aether, or nonexistence of a preferred frame. These things have no bearing on the predictions of relativity. Einstein's 1905 paper did not say whether the aether exists, or whether a preferred frame exists. These are all modern misunderstandings of relativity.

Lorentz's 1895 and Einstein's 1905 papers say the same thing about the aether -- that it is not needed for the theory. Both papers choose reference frames that are "at rest" or "stationary", but emphasize that they are equivalent to other frames, in the sense that a change of variables makes Maxwell's equations look the same.

Poincare went a step further in 1905 and showed that the Lorentz transformations make a symmetry group relating the frames, and inducing relationships in the electromagnetic variables. For years, he argued that belief in the aether was a mathematical convenience.

This point is at the core of her misunderstandings.

In the above paper, she goes into detail to credit Einstein with ideas that Lorentz or Poincare published years earlier. One of her main examples is that Einstein published the velocity addition law in 1907. Poincare had already discovered it in a May 1905 letter to Lorentz, as she acknowledged in a 2012 paper. Einstein relied on the relativity principle in 1905, but that was copied from what Poincare wrote years earlier. As she explains:

Poincaré went further than Lorentz by recognizing the group properties of the transformations and emphasizing the principle of relativity. Yet he too remained within the conceptual confines of the ether, with all the limitations this entailed. ... The deeper reason is ontological. Like Lorentz, Poincaré retained the ether — conceived as a real, if undetectable, medium — as the ultimate backdrop of electrodynamics. This commitment barred him from taking the decisive step that Einstein did in 1905.

After the first sentence, this is gibberish. Poincare had a group symmetry identifying any inertial frame with any other. An undetectable aether could not possibly limit his theory. Einstein himself denied that he abolished the aether.

I am baffled as to how she can say anything this stupid. She either misunderstands relativity, or does not know what a symmetry group is, or she is bluffing with buzz words to puff up Einstein's reputation.

She has lengthy discussions of some side issues, like stellar aberration. Apparently there is some literature on whether Einstein misunderstood aberration. I have no opinion on this. Einstein's treatment was more or less the same as Lorentz's ten years earlier, and does not have much to with priority for relativity.

In the paper, she writes some formulas and then imagines that Einstein could have written them but not Poincare.

Now, that is retro-fitting Einstein’s conceptual step into Poincaré’s framework. It is not something Poincaré himself could have justified in 1905. Here, we declare the phase to be invariant under Lorentz transformations (66). In modern language, this means the phase is a relativistic scalar. This is not just a calculation move. Making the phase invariant was a conceptual step, not a purely technical one. That is a very Einsteinian step because it assumes that all inertial frames are equivalent and that no preferred ether frame exists.

What she is saying here is that Einstein would have understood the concept of a relativistic scalar, but Poincare would not have. She literally says that considering a Lorentz invariant is an "Einsteinian step".

Again, I am baffled at how she can say something so ignorant. Einstein does not have the concept in 1905, and appeared to not understand it until many years later. But Poincare has relativistic scalars in his long 1905 paper.

A relativistic scalar is a function that is invariant under Lorentz transformation. More generally, a relativistic vector or tensor obeys geometric formulas for Lorentz transformations. Sometimes these are called covariant (or contravariant) and 4-vectors or 4d tensors.

Poincare's long 1905 paper devotes several pages to finding relativistic scalars. He finds the Minkowski metric, E*B, and E²-B², where E and B are the electric and magnetic fields. The latter is particularly interesting because it forms the Lagrangian density for Maxwell's equations, with no charges. When there are charges or currents, there is an extra term.

This is all explained in detail in Henri Poincare and Relativity Theory by the Russian, A. A. Logunov, 2004.

Lorentz group invariance goes to the heart of what special relativity was all about. The chief accomplishment was to express Maxwell's equations in a way that behaves properly under Lorentz transformations, thereby realizing the Maxwell theory as a relativistic theory.

This idea is what sold everyone on the theory. The Maxwell theory had decades of experimental verification, but it left puzzles such as the inability to detect the Earth's motion through the aether. Suddenly it all made sense, with relativity.

Poincare proved this in two ways -- by providing a Lorentz invariant Lagrangian, and by using a 4-vector electromagnetic potential. Minkowski added a third, showing a covariant field tensor.

Einstein understood none of this. According to Logunov, he was still confused about it in 1933. I think he probably figured it out around 1913.

What Einstein did do in 1905 was to re-derive Lorentz's 1895 Vorsuch theorem of the corresponding states. This meant that there were ways to change variables so they satisfy a version of Maxwell's equations in a moving frame. Einstein's theory was equivalent to Lorentz's,

The preferred view today, pioneered by Poincare and Minkowski, is that relativity is a spacetime theory. The Lorentz transformations form a symmetry group of spacetime. Relativistic scalars, vectors, and tensors obey those symmetries. The laws of physics are formulated in terms of those tensors, and the switch to a moving frame is an automatic consequence of the geometry. The transformation of Maxwell's equations is induced by the transformation of spacetime.

By doing it this way, Poincare established relativity as a theory applying to all the laws of physics. He even applied it to gravity in 1905. The Lorentz-Einstein version was a way to understand the relativity of electromagnetism, but it was unclear whether and how it would apply to something else, like gravity.

I spell this out because Weinstein's arguments for crediting relativity require ignoring the heart of the theory. She says Lorentz and Poincare did not take the decisive step, but Einstein was the one not taking that step. The essence of relativity is the non-euclidean geometry on spacetime, and laws of physics respecting that geometry. Poincare and Minkowski had it, and Einstein did not.

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.

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.

Distinguishing Convention and Empiricism

New paper:

Einstein's Hidden Scaffolding, with a Glance at Poincaré
Galina Weinstein

This paper reconstructs the derivations underlying the kinematical part of Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper, emphasizing their operational clarity and minimalist use of mathematics. Einstein employed modest tools-algebraic manipulations, Taylor expansions, partial differentials, and functional arguments-yet his method was guided by principles of linearity, symmetry, and invariance rather than the elaborate frameworks of electron theory. The published text in "Annalen der Physik" concealed much of the algebraic scaffolding, presenting instead a streamlined sequence of essential equations. Far from reflecting a lack of sophistication, this economy of means was a deliberate rhetorical and philosophical choice: to demonstrate that relativity arises from two simple postulates and basic operational definitions, not from the complexities of electron theory. The reconstruction highlights how Einstein's strategy subordinated mathematics to principle, advancing a new mode of reasoning in which physical insight, rather than computational elaboration, held decisive authority. In this respect, I show that Einstein's presentation diverges sharply from Poincaré's.

She analyzes Einstein's definition of time synchronization, which appears to be straight out of Poincare's 1898 paper, his formulas for the Lorentz transformation, which appear to be from Lorentz's 1904 paper, and his declaration of the Lorentz transformation forming a group, which seems to be from Poincare's earlier 1905 paper.

Einstein did not cite his sources, so there have been suspicions of plagiarism. Most scholars agree that there was some plagiarism, but disagree on how much.

She discusses a gap in Einstein's derivation of the Lorentz transformations, and whether Einstein worked backwards from a known result.

The "divergence" is mainly that Poincare is a mathematician, and is more mathematically precise in his papers. He shows that the Lorentz transformations form a symmetry group, and we observe the relativity principle because Maxwell's equations are invariant under the symmetry. One can choose particular coordinates for convenience, as they are equivalent to any other coordinates.

Einstein never really gets this point. He does show that composing a Lorentz boost with its inverse gives the identity, which is one of the steps in showing the transformations form a group. But he does not show that other Lorentz transformations can be composed, or appreciate the significance of being a group.

She acknowledges all this, but tries to spin it in Einstein's favor, as if using sloppy or plagiarized math meant he must have understood the physics better. She writes:

In reality, the gulf is structural. Poincaré’s framework remains tied to the ether and treats simultaneity as conventional fiction, whereas Einstein fuses convention and empiricism into a universal principle of relativity. Poincaré never crossed this threshold. In 1898, he recognized the conventionality of simultaneity and sketched the midpoint procedure, but only as a practical rule for determining longitude in astronomy. There is no invocation of c as a universal constant, no fusion of convention with empirical invariance, and no kinematical framework built upon it. In 1900, he linked the midpoint procedure to Lorentz’s local time: observers in uniform motion, ignorant of their drift through the ether, assume equal one-way propagation times. But for Poincaré, this was a fiction: in truth, only the ether rest frame contained the “true time,” and only there was the one-way velocity isotropic. He accepted the two-way constancy of light speed as an empirical fact, yet he relegated one-way isotropy to an illusion produced by convention.

She is wrong to say Poincare did not invoke c as a universal constant. Here is what he wrote, in his big 1905 relativity paper:

Lorentz had adopted a particular system of units, so as to eliminate the factors 4π in the formulas. I'll do the same, plus I choose the units of length and time so that the speed of light is equal to 1.

In his previous 1904 St. Louis lecture, he wrote:

an entirely new mechanics, which would be, above all, characterized by this fact, that no velocity could surpass that of light, any more than any temperature could fall below the zero absolute

Poincare did draw a distinction between conventional and empirical knowledge, and Einstein did not. This is a point that is obvious to mathematicians, and endlessly confusing to physicists. A mathematical truth is a theorem proved from axioms, and cannot be falsified. An empirical finding might be upset by a new experiment.

It is amazing how these Einstein scholars will do back flips to try to credit Einstein for relativity. She dedicates the paper to another Einstein scholar who did the same.

I have previously criticized her here and here. She has another new pro-Einstein paper, and I am about to post a rebuttal. Here is how she describes herself:

I am a scholar specializing in general relativity, black hole physics, and the philosophy of physics, with deep expertise in the theoretical, historical, and conceptual dimensions of Einstein’s work.

No, she is just an Israeli Einstein shill. I will have more to say in my next post.

Modern Interpretation of Length Contraction

A confusing question is whether the length contraction of relativity is real. I got this explanation from xAI:

In contemporary physics, length contraction is understood as a consequence of the Lorentz transformation in special relativity, which describes how measurements of space and time differ between inertial reference frames moving relative to one another. The key points of the modern view are:

• Relativity of Measurements: Length contraction is a real, measurable effect, but it is frame-dependent. If an observer in frame ( S ) measures a rod at rest in frame ( S' ) (moving at velocity ( v ) relative to ( S )), the rod’s length in ( S ) appears shorter by a factor of

  \sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}

  . This is described by the Lorentz transformation:
  L = L_0 \sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}
  where

  L_0

  is the proper length (length in the rod’s rest frame), and ( L ) is the contracted length in the observer’s frame.
• Geometric Perspective: Length contraction is often explained as a consequence of the geometry of Minkowski spacetime, a flat, pseudo-Euclidean four-dimensional manifold with a metric signature (e.g.,

  (+,+,+,-)

  ). The contraction arises because observers in different frames slice spacetime differently, leading to different projections of a worldline’s spatial extent. This geometric view emphasizes the relativity of simultaneity: what one observer measures as a “length” depends on how they define simultaneous events.
• “Apparent” vs. “Real”: Modern texts avoid calling length contraction “apparent” in the sense of being an illusion, but they emphasize its dependence on the observer’s reference frame. It’s real in the sense that it’s consistently measurable (e.g., a moving object fits into a shorter space in the observer’s frame), but it’s not an intrinsic change to the object itself—its proper length remains invariant. The effect is a result of the geometry of spacetime and the conventions of measurement, not a physical compression. ...
• Textbook Treatments: Modern relativity texts (e.g., Taylor & Wheeler’s Spacetime Physics or Hartle’s Gravity) describe length contraction as a geometric effect, often using spacetime diagrams to show how different frames yield different lengths. This is closer to Varićak’s geometric interpretation than Lorentz’s physical contraction.

It goes on in detail, saying that Lorentz viewed the contraction as physical, while the modern geometric view was championed by Minkowski and Varicak.

The curious thing is where Einstein stood. Everyone assumes that he had the modern geometric view, but that is completely false. As xAI explains:

The Disagreement:

The core issue was Varićak’s interpretation of length contraction:

• Varićak’s View: Varićak argued that length contraction in Einstein’s theory was an “apparent” or “psychological” phenomenon, resulting from the convention of clock synchronization and time measurements in different frames. He contrasted this with Lorentz’s theory, where he considered length contraction an “objective” physical effect due to the ether. Varićak’s hyperbolic geometry approach framed relativistic effects in a way that emphasized mathematical elegance and suggested that some phenomena might be observer-dependent artifacts.
• Einstein’s Criticism: Einstein published a brief rebuttal in 1911, asserting that his interpretation of length contraction was closer to Lorentz’s in that it was a real, measurable effect, not merely apparent or psychological. He argued that length contraction was a direct consequence of the relative motion between frames, as described by the Lorentz transformation, and not contingent on subjective measurement conventions. Einstein likely saw Varićak’s interpretation as undermining the physical reality of relativistic effects, which he considered fundamental to his theory.

This is a surprisingly accurate account of the different views of length contraction. AI is not always right, but it is relying on mainstream sources here.

By 1911, the geometric view of relativity was very well established, and yet Einstein published a disavowal of it.

Einstein had 5 years to learn relativity, and he still did not get it.

There are people who argue that Einstein should be credited for relativity, because Lorentz and Poincare occasionally made reference to an aether or preferred frame, years after Einstein's 1905 paper. But these are not errors, and Einstein also referred to an aether. It is a simple mathematical fact that one can choose a preferred frame without affecting relativity. Cosmologists always do exactly that, using the cosmic microwave background.

Maybe Lorentz rejected the geometric view in 1911, I don't know. It is astounding that Einstein did. The geometric view was the key thing that made relativity better than Lorentz's 1895 theory. If Einstein did not agree with it, then he had nothing over what Lorentz had many years earlier. The geometric view of Minkowski's 1908 paper is what made relativity widely accepted.

Einstein's 1905 paper did have some better formulas than Lorentz's 1895 paper, but no better than Lorentz's 1904 paper. Lorentz already had the key ideas of length contraction and local time in 1895. FitzGerald had the length contraction in 1889, using an argument similar to Einstein's.

I have read a lot of Einstein commentary, but I have never seen the Einstein fans explain why he was still disavowing geometric relativity in 1911. He did not understand or accept what became the modern interpretation.

A new paper discusses some history:

On Bell's dynamical route to special relativity
Frederick W. Strauch

The Michelson-Morley experiment was published in 1887, and already in 1888 Oliver Heaviside showed that Maxwell's equations implied a contraction of electric fields in the direction of the motion. This inspired FitzGerald, Larmor, and maybe even Lorentz to figure that solid objects might contract, if held together by electromagnetics forces, as we now know that they are. This is the dynamical interpretation that is out of favor today, but it was important historically, and is a legitimate way to understand the contraction.

The paper cites this 2018 paper on The dynamical approach to spacetime theories by Brown and Read. It defends the dynamical view, and describes the geometric view this way:

In the last few decades, the approach has come to life within the philosophy of physics as a reaction to aspects of the ‘angle bracket school’ of spacetime theories, first prominently exposed in the philosophical literature of the 1970s and especially the 1980s.5 The central role of geometry in the treatment of pre-general relativistic theories in this approach has led some philosophers to the view that special relativistic effects such as length contraction and time dilation are ultimately explained by recourse to the geometric structure of Minkowski spacetime, and that all such explanations prior to the 1908 work of Minkowski are either misguided or incomplete.

I guess it is called ‘angle bracket school’ because it takes the metric on Minkowski space as the fundamental covariant object. That was the approach of Poincare in 1905-6 and Minkowski in 1907-8, so I think he means that the approaches of FitzGerald, Lorentz, and Einstein were deficient for not understanding the non-euclidean geometry of Poincare and Minkowski.

The dynamical interpretation is not wrong. It can explain the contraction on a molecular level, using Maxwell's equations. It is just not the modern view that Poincare and Minkowski invented.

Brown and Read start by saying:

In 1940, Einstein offered the following nutshell account of his special theory of relativity (SR):1

The content of the restricted relativity theory can ... be summarised in one sentence: all natural laws must be so conditioned that they are covariant with respect to Lorentz transformations. [17, p. 329]

This innocuous-sounding statement actually represents on Einstein’s part a significant departure from his 1905 ‘principle theory’ approach to SR, based upon the relativity principle, the light postulate, and the isotropy of space. The shift in his thinking did not come about overnight.

This description seems to avoid mentioning light or geometry, but those are implicit.

Poincare and Minkowski proved that Maxwell's equations were covariant with respect to Lorentz transformations. Einstein only showed a version of Lorentz's 1895 theorem about corresponding states.

Brown and Read see this as consistent with their eccentric dynamical views. I would rather rephrase it as saying that all natural laws are well-defined on Minkowski space, which has a Lorentz invariant geometry. It is interesting that Einstein was still not willing to make an explicitly geometrical statement in 1940.

They say:

We expect undergraduates to imbibe in their first course on relativity theory a profound insight largely obscure to all the nineteenth century giants, including Maxwell, Lorentz, Larmor and Poincaré: the physical meaning of inertial coordinate transformations. It was Einstein in 1905 who was the first to understand the physics of such transformations,17 and the fact they are neither a priori nor conventional.

I think they are trying to say that Einstein rejected the idea that the Lorentz transformations were just reflections of the underlying spacetime geometry. They believe the dynamical view is superior to the modern geometrical view, so I guess they are trying to credit Einstein with having a dynamical view. It appears to me that Einstein tried to avoid committing himself to being for or against the dynamical view. For example, he wrote:

One cannot ask whether the contraction should be understood as a consequence of the modification of molecular forces caused by motion or as a kinematic consequence arising from the foundations of the theory of relativity. Both points of view are justified. [letter to Varicak, 1911]

Note that Einstein does not even mention the geometric view. I would say that the contraction should be understood as the divergence between the non-euclidean spacetime geometry, and the more familiar euclidean geometry.

A 1909 paper had credited Einstein with rejecting Lorentz's molecular force contraction, but Einstein disavowed having adopted a view different from Lorentz's.

In the geometric view, aka angle bracket school, the physics is in the geometry. The Lorentz transformation is just a change of coordinates with no real physical significance.

One might similarly argue that Earth longitude being based on the Prime Meridian has no real significance. If you measure longitude you will get numbers that depend on that choice, but the physics of whatever you are observing does not. The superior geometric view is that the physics does not depend on the coordinates, and that a coordinate choice can be mathematically transformed into any other choice, without affecting the physics.