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.