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.
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.
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 feel that academics often have significant insight into the history of their own fields and personalities therein, but that knowledge is rarely condensed/disseminated. Perhaps it's because matters can get quite political and subjective at that level.
From Emilio Segre (Nobel Laureate) there is this 2 book series.Recommended. - From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves [1] - From X-rays to Quarks [2]
Then, you have Abraham Pais, all his books are highly recommended, I will include 2 here
[3] Subtle is the lord (Best Einstein Scientific Biography) [4] Inward Bound (Superb Scientific history of XX century physics)
Jagdish Mehra wrote a gargantuan history of Quantum Mechanics in six volumes. He studied and /or interviewed most of the big hitters who developed the theory. The science content is high so you need a good foundation.
[5] The Historical Development of Quantum Theory
Richard Westfall wrote the best Newton biography that I know.
[6] Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
Finally the issue number 2 of the 72nd volume of Review of Modern Physics [7] is a gem; packed with historical reviews of the development of all fields in physics during the 20th century, written by eminent people.
Of course this is just a minuscule sample of an extraordinary bibliography. Sadly life is so short to make it justice.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486458083 [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486457834 [3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/019853907X [4] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198519974 [5]https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Development-Quantum-Theory... [6] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521274354 [7] https://journals.aps.org/rmp/issues/71/2
To make matters worse, the introductory paragraph was written by someone who has no training as an historian, and therefore also just paraphrases some tradition of introductory paragraphs.
As a concrete example, Newton's laws are actually not in the principia, but instead only appear a hundred years or so after his death. ( It is actually not unreasonable to still call them Newton's laws, but the argument is a lot more complicated than "Newton wrote Newton's laws.")
There are a lot of interesting historical figures. Probably most people stick to the figures most familiar to them in their own field. The histories of Dijkstra and Turing come to mind... it strikes me that I don't know a lot about Knuth.
> Perhaps it's because matters can get quite political and subjective at that level.
Much more than I would have thought.
Practically every grad student encountering Kaluza-Klein (and other supergravities) or the PPN formalism will spend some time with Nordström's gravitation (and of course it is discussed in §27.6 and §38.2 of Misner Thorne & Wheeler, the gold standard textbook). In the latter case it is straightforward to see in modern terms where Nordström's 1913 theory would clash with solar-system observations (it was ruled out by the Eddington eclipse observation) and spectacularly falls apart for compact massive objects like the Hulse-Taylor binary. The theory inverts the spatial curvature generated by matter (PPN \gamma parameters for Newton, GR, and Nordstöm 1913 are 0, 1, and -1 respectively) and is only half-right for gravitational nonlinearity (\beta parameters 0, 1, and 1/2). Einstein-Fokker 1914 fails under PPN analysis in the same way, except that they properly fix the \zeta_{4} dynamical conservation parameter as 0, unlike Nordström 1913.
In my view, early 20th century alternatives to GR are interesting for how they failed. I accept the part of your argument that it is more interesting to some than to others about how much cross-fertilization there was among the developers of these theories. However, only GR has survived contact with all experimental tests, and it has proven extremely difficult for alternatives to match over multiple solid angle and wavelength scales what astronomers observe. The ways in which various extra-field approaches have failed are frankly more useful for theoretical physicists than the ways in which they were developed in the first place. And for astrophysicists, the only thing that matters is what has not -- so far -- failed.
So however he got there, at least with respect to gravitation Einstein deserves recognition for having produced pretty much the only viable physical theory. There's really only Jordan/Brans-Dicke in the limit of a vanishing \frac{1}{\omega} parameter, but at zero the theory reduces to GR itself; Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble if one does headstands to suppress spacetime torsion; early-decay bimetric theories, where the second metric field decouples or vanishes before nucleosynthesis; supergravity, if one figures out how to hide the gravitino; and string theory (M-theory), if one figures out the landscape problem and/or works out a general emergence of a PPN match. Notably every one of these evolved from General Relativity mostly because of its unique successes -- however, I think it is more interesting and better to say that these remain viable because they can in certain circumstances fully reproduce General Relativity.
"I know some of these words."
Stress-energy tensor (field): multidimensional quantity assigned to each point of a space describing how matter and energy are concentrated and moving at that point.
Trace: coordinate invariant transformation that turns a tensor field into a scalar field.
Diffeomorphism invariant: the object in question has the same description regardless of arbitrary coordinate changes
Really makes you wonder what would research would like without the race for publication.
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.
A lot of quantum field theorist refer to "Einstein summation convention" which is a special case of Ricci calculus and is a notation that was developed together with Levi-Civita by Ricci in their contributions to the field of relativity. At least most quantum field theorist know about Levi-Civita through the Levi-Civita tensor. Given the controversy described in this article one wonders why they are called the Einstein equations and the Hilbert-Einstein action when Einstein indusputably had nothing to do with the derivation of the action principle but Hilbert disputably is responsible for the derivation of the field equations. At the very least people talk about the Lorentz transformation and the Poincare group.
Since general relativity was essentially a unification of the spacetime defined by Maxwell's equations (special relativity) and gravitation, the quest to fully unify the theories that began with Lorentz and Poincare pointing out the strange transformation properties of electric matter continued. A lot of people are aware of Einstein's continued search for a Grand Unified Theory. But in general people are less aware of what theories he introduced (teleparallel gravity for example) or that other people were all trying (Kaluza and Klein for example) and continue to try to this day. In the case of things like dark matter, there might be some hope of measuring the Kaluza-Klein scalar fields or maybe we genuinely need a completely different theory. The history is more interesting because of the missteps, mistakes and politics along the way. It helps us understand the missteps, mistakes and politics of science that are still happening today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
Einstein is a bit famous for punching well above his weight compared to his own mathematical background. Most of his great work involves beautiful arguments that requiring only maths that a good-but-not-genius high school student could understand.
The GR paper is a bit disappointing in comparison, because after setting out as much as he can of the physics, he just dives into big equations one after another. That probably roughly follows his own trajectory: first he had some intuition for how space-time curvature could cause some gravity-like effects. But to nail it down he just had to buckle-up and learn the mathematics of non-euclidean geometry.
The nice thing about the paper is that it was one of the first applications of such mathematics to physics, so Einstein takes the time to explain it (which also blows out the equation count).
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calcu...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this misses the forest for the trees.
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.
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?
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.
If we want an accurate historical record of human achievement, yes.
That's separate to the end result. If you're focused on the theory and nothing else, then it doesn't really matter that Einstein wrote it either. We could remove the attribution entirely and the theory would still exist.
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.
That depends on why Hilbert didn't publish first. There are plenty of examples of people from minorities (women and PoC especially) discovering theorems but the scientific community ignoring them, and then a rich white man publishing the same theory to great acclaim. And then, even hundreds of years later, governments failing to fund the education of those minorities on the basis that they're genetically inferior because no one from those minorities has published anything of note.
Correctly attributing discoveries to the right people does make a difference in the wider context of society.
Can you provide 2 or 3 examples of that? I know there are STEM contributions on the engineering side - patents, work at NASA - that often go unmentioned, but I've never heard of solid evidence that actual provable research was ignored.
(c.f https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_motu_corporum_in_gyrum)
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.
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.
General relativity is indeed well named instead of Einstein relativity, Pythagorean’s theorem could become the rectangle triangle theorem ...
Certainly 45” is arcseconds here, not inches!
Hamilton/Perelman: Hamilton does X. Perelman builds on it to do Y, which solves an important problem. Perelman gets most of the credit and complains that Hamilton ought to get more.
I see two ways to try to map Einstein/Hilbert onto this but neither of them works well.
Einstein/Hilbert #1 (X = differential geometry): Other mathematicians do X. Einstein and Hilbert build on it to get Y, which solves an important problem. Maybe Hilbert gets to Y slightly earlier or slightly later. Einstein gets most of the credit. Hilbert is slightly annoyed.
Einstein/Hilbert #2 (X = early work on general relativity): Einstein does X. Einstein and Hilbert build on it to get Y, which solves an important problem. Maybe Hilbert gets there slightly earlier or slightly later. Einstein gets most of the credit. Hilbert is slightly annoyed.
If you see this as "Einstein, then Hilbert" then the analogy doesn't work because Einstein (earlier) is the one who gets the credit. If you see it as "Hilbert, then Einstein" then it doesn't work because Einstein (later) isn't building on a substantial foundation built by Hilbert (earlier) without Einstein; the foundation is Einstein's for sure, and if Hilbert has priority it's the last step that he got to before Einstein. And in either case it doesn't work because the one who gets the credit is happy to keep it whereas Perelman was really cross that people didn't see how much was due to Hamilton.
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.
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.
The most persuasive narrative to me for why Einstein is credited is because he moved to the USA at the right time and introduced these ideas to American scientists at the time when the USA was starting to become more scientifically prominent than Europe. Of course they would associate those ideas with Einstein and credit him, he would be the citation they would know about and wouldn't have any reason to cite further work since his citations are self contained enough for their purposes. It isn't nefarious, it isn't meritocratic: it is just pragmatic.
