Special Relativity in the 21st century

On Aug 23, 9:15*am, John Kennaugh
wrote:
PD wrote:
On Aug 21, 8:03*am, Pentcho Valev wrote:
On Aug 21, 2:31*pm, PD wrote:

On Aug 21, 6:34*am, Pentcho Valev wrote:
Einstein got the idea of the second postulate from the Lorentz
transformation equations of course - he was Albert the Plagiarist
before becoming Divine Albert. See the end of chapter 11 in his
"Relativity":

ALL physicists build on the foundations of their predecessors. There
is NO physicist that can claim wholly original work, and none do. I
don't know where you got the idea that this was claimed of Einstein.

Newton acknowledged that he owed major debts to Galileo and Kepler,
and he incorporated their work in his.

The same is true for Joule, Gibbs, Lord Kelvin, Maxwell, Coriolis,
Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi, Bardeen, and Feynman, and they
freely acknowledge this.

This does not suffice as a criticism. Rather, it is how science works.

No references in Einstein's 1905 paper? Poincaré and Lorentz not even
mentioned? Is it how science works?

There were no references in Newton's Principia, either.
Einstein acknowledged his debt and the work of his predecessors in
many other writings.

He certainly acknowledged Lorentz of whom he said
" He brought theory into harmony with experience by means of a wonderful
simplification of theoretical principles. He achieved this, the most
important advance in the theory of electricity since Maxwell ...."
1920 lecture

What is interesting is that he makes no mention of Poincaré. If one
wants and unbiased view of who did what then perhaps one should look to
a historian rather than a physicist.

In the second volume of Sir Edmund Whittaker's The History of
Theories of Aether and Electricity, published in 1953, there is a
chapter on relativity, entitled, "The Relativity Theory of Poincare and
Lorentz." Einstein is mentioned for the first time in a paragraph on the
thirteenth page.

"(1905) Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory
of Poincare and Lorentz with some amplification, and which attracted
much attention. He asserted as a fundamental principle the constancy of
the velocity of light, i.e., that the velocity of light in a vacuum is
the same in all systems of reference which are moving relatively to each
other, an assertion which at the time was widely accepted. In this paper
Einstein gave modifications which must now be introduced into the
formulae for aberration and for the Doppler effect."

My understanding was that Poincaré put forward a number of suggestions
without being very specific or decisive as to which was superior and
that Einstein developed one of Poincaré's ideas but I could be wrong
about that. In the end of course the only thing left of that idea is the
maths and they were first produced by Lorentz who should get the credit
rather than Einstein. Had Einstein succeeded in producing a theoretical
structure without the asymmetry in the theoretical structure of
Lorentz's theory it would be a different matter but in SR the same maths
as Lorentz is presented without a theoretical structure and SR only
became acceptable when physics decided that a theory didn't need a
theoretical structure.

It's worth nothing that it is not all that uncommon for people to do
work in parallel and independently, pretty much unaware of each other.
Part of the reason for this is that the same precursor work will
provoke the same questions, and two or more people will go about
trying to answer the same question over the next several years.
Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomanaga are excellent examples of this, all
working on quantum electrodynamic independently and pretty much
unaware of each other's work.

Science is a human endeavor.

PD