I don't know the Olinto De Pretto reference I will look it up I know the Poincare reference have you ever actually read it?
The mathematics is right you would expect that of Poincare he was a gennius but there is no absolute uniform motion, there is no absolute time, events have the same duration (so no time dialation), they are conventional as they occur in different places.
The most daming to me was he talks about a way to synchronise all the clocks of an inertial frame. That is he has a zero reference frame which means he implicitly didn't really have true General Relativity it is much more like a modified Newtonian physics.
Einstein as you noted did acknowledge the mathematics of Poincare so I think that step alone tells you that the two men realized there concepts are subtley different.
Poincare was definitely close as I think was Hilbert and probably a few others.
The one I feel offended you left out was Maxwell ... Richard Feynman famously derived E=MC2 out of Maxwell's equations and they were published in 1861. So if we follow your logic Maxwell should be credited with relativity.
But thats the point relativity is ALOT MORE than E=MC2
At the end of the day noone was awarded a nobel prize for relativity.
Einstein is linked to relativity so heavily because he was the one defending it in the public. Read the history of 100 author's against Einstein it wasn't 100 author's against Poincare.
You say he was accused of plagiarizing by whom histoprically?
I am not talking about the recent neo-nazi facist crap on the internet which you seem to have bought.
This rubbish seem to be quite common now with the stupidity and pseudo science on the internet.
Newtonian physics - Newton, Kepler or Hookes invented?
Radio - Tesla, Marconi or Popov?
It goes on and on.
Last edited by Orac; 08/26/11 03:26 AM.
