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.