The history misses several salient steps, like Lorentz and Poincare describing special relativity before 1905. I guess if you want to describe the controversy of general relativity you might not want to get distracted by the controversy over special relativity... but a pattern starts to emerge.<p>Then the history leaves out Nordstrom's contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going to state that "It is indisputable that Hilbert, like all of his other colleagues, acknowledged Einstein as the sole creator of relativity theory," it seems Hilbert was simply willing to drop it. Almost all practitioners I am aware of are at the very least aware of the contributions of Marcel Grossman even if nobody knows about Nordstrom and others. It is a huge overstatement to say that Einstein was the sole creator.<p>Reading about the history of Nordstrom's theory of gravity is far more illuminating on the actual active research attempting to find a relativistic theory of gravity. In fact a student of Lorentz, Fokker, working with Einstein was able to show that Nordstrom's theory was equivalent to an expression involving the ricci scalar and a trace of the stress energy tensor. Unlike Einstein's proposal around this time, it was diffeomorphism invariant. It is likely this development, by Fokker, lead Einstein to propose the R_ij = 8\pi T_ij formulation he was pushing before the controversial period with Hilbert.<p>Why might this be important? Well people have a tendency to be interested in history. The extended history involving Hilbert, Nordstrom, Grossman and more is important because it is more illuminating to the reality of how physical theories are actually developed. It turns out that maybe Einstein doesn't deserve the level of hero worship he gets, which certain types of people may find invigorating. Also, this episode shows that petty squabbles and politics exist in "modern" science.
I find it uncanny how a "who got it first?" become a salient question today whereas as the time it was obvious both were excited at collaborating to make a theory that works well.<p>Really makes you wonder what would research would like without the race for publication.<p>What I was taught about this "rivalry" is that Einstein struggled with some parts of the theory and Hilbert proposed some complicated mathematical tools that Einstein at first felt should not be necessary but ended up using after a few months of frustration.
Kind of pointless question.<p>Einstein clearly is the "boss" of general relativity. He got the idea, worked on it, applied the maths, etc... So let him have his name.<p>But he wasn't alone. It is not possible to talk about general relativity without mentioning a dozen of brilliant minds that either helped him along the way or served as a foundation.<p>A part that I think is often forgotten is about the guys who made observations, the engineers and craftsmen who built the instruments, and the experimentalists who interpreted the results.<p>General relativity did one thing: solve the inconsistency regarding the orbit of Mercury. And without accurate measurement, that inconsistency would have been within the error margin, making general relativity nothing more than wankery.
No mention of Hermann Minkowski[1]? As any educated mathematician knows, it was Gauss's student Riemann who solved the maths for n-dimensional manifolds, but it was Minkowski who developed modern spacetime.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski</a>
Does it matter?<p>I think this misses the forest for the trees.<p>Yeah, we can focus on the first to discover something, but awards and acknowledgments are often on first to publish, e.g. Make it public.<p>After all, what does your grand descovery matter if you're the only one that knows about it and someone working in parallel finds it also and publishes first? And how does the scientific community verify the veracity of discovering first if you didnt publish first?<p>Hilbert might have know about it first, but what does it matter to the world writ large if he didnt publish? Einstein published, and thus the world knows and he is thus recognized for that.
Reminds me of Newton, Hooke and Hailey arguments<p>(c.f <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_motu_corporum_in_gyrum" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_motu_corporum_in_gyrum</a>)<p>It has been common to see such debates but at the end having advanced science is the main goal and these fights while fascinating are anecdotal.<p>I always wonder if one could rewrite math and physics without the use of names to describe a theory or a théorème but rather use a descriptive one.<p>General relativity is indeed well named instead of Einstein relativity, Pythagorean’s theorem could become the rectangle triangle theorem ...
<i>> 2. The precession (change in orientation) of the perihelion (closest point of a planet to its star) of Mercury coming out to 18 inches rather than the observed 45 inches per century;</i><p>Certainly 45” is arcseconds here, not inches!
Sounds like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman</a> versus <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Hamilton" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Hamilton</a>
Maybe off-topic, but with the dates and places, it's hard not to think of this furiously paced physics and math work happening in the midst of World War 1, and not that far from it.<p>I wonder how the context affected their work. I would love for a physicist, a mathematician, a historian of science, and Dan Carlin to do a Hardcore History on this period.
A bit of a nit but the section on 'Timeline of relativity theory' should probably start with Galileo - this is still reflected in terminology like 'Galilean principle of relativity', 'Galilean transformation', 'Galilean invariance' etc
It’s clear that it’s not who did the math first that gets recognition, but the person who makes the scientific leap to connect math to new ideas of how the world works.<p>Lorentz and Poincaré both had mathematical formulations that were the same as Einstein’s special relativity, but Einstein was the one who gets credit for connecting them to what we now call special relativity.
Einstein was a pacifist and agreed with Spinoza's philosophy. I speculate Einstein just wanted things published the earliest in any case and for the next problems to be focused on.