Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 66 posts

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#21

Post by BlackFly »

arugulum wrote: post #17
BlackFly wrote: post #11

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. Then the history leaves out Nordstrom's contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going t…

I would love to read a deep dive into the history of (semi) modern science. In particular, one that would avoid pop-science analogies and that is unafraid of technical detail. Ideally one that is more focused on the intricacies and lineage of research than the particulars of researchers' personal lives. I feel that academics often have significant insight into the history of their own fields and personalities therein…

I had a professor briefly that studied the history of mathematics. During lectures while he was developing out proofs he would often describe the historical context in which the proof was first developed. Galois has a particularly interesting (tragic) story.

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.

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#22

Post by sampo »

BlackFly wrote: post #11

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. Then the history leaves out Nordstrom's contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going t…

Here's a short article on Nordström: https://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/eisaksso/nordstrom/nordstrom...

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#23

Post by cambalache »

arugulum wrote: post #17
BlackFly wrote: post #11

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. Then the history leaves out Nordstrom's contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going t…

I would love to read a deep dive into the history of (semi) modern science. In particular, one that would avoid pop-science analogies and that is unafraid of technical detail. Ideally one that is more focused on the intricacies and lineage of research than the particulars of researchers' personal lives. I feel that academics often have significant insight into the history of their own fields and personalities therein…

In physics there is a rich literature documenting its history. And as you mentioned, it is scattered around books, periodicals and scientific journals. A very small selection for you and any people interested:

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

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#24

Post by BlackFly »

Iv wrote: post #5

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. 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 tool…

I thought Marcel Grossmann was usually credited with helping Einstein with the tensor approach to General Relativity. All of this was more salient at the time, which the article points out: Hilbert carried a grudge against Einstein for a period of time. Lorentz was bitter about Einstein getting credit for special relativity to the end of his days, and Einstein denied ever having read Lorentz's or Poincare's papers even long after he had moved to the Institute for Advanced Studies. The bitterness and personal politics involved have faded. It is now interesting just from an academic (historical) standpoint.

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.

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#25

Post by BlackFly »

j7ake wrote: post #13

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. 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.

This narrative is very unpersuasive, since the actual mechanics that are used to perform calculations in special relativity and the idea that they should apply to all matter were developed by Lorentz and Poincare starting in the 1890s. The moving clock idea was also introduced by them before Einstein in 1900 and 1904.

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.

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#26

Post by soVeryTired »

BlackFly wrote: post #24
Iv wrote: post #5

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. 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 tool…

I thought Marcel Grossmann was usually credited with helping Einstein with the tensor approach to General Relativity. All of this was more salient at the time, which the article points out: Hilbert carried a grudge against Einstein for a period of time. Lorentz was bitter about Einstein getting credit for special relativity to the end of his days, and Einstein denied ever having read Lorentz's or Poincare's papers ev…

Stigler's law of eponomy says that no scientific law is named after its discoverer [0]. What you're describing is far more common than you might think!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#27

Post by yk »

arugulum wrote: post #17
BlackFly wrote: post #11

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. Then the history leaves out Nordstrom's contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going t…

I would love to read a deep dive into the history of (semi) modern science. In particular, one that would avoid pop-science analogies and that is unafraid of technical detail. Ideally one that is more focused on the intricacies and lineage of research than the particulars of researchers' personal lives. I feel that academics often have significant insight into the history of their own fields and personalities therein…

Academics really do not have significant insight into the history of their own field. The problem is really, that history makes for a nice introductory paragraph and by the time you can call yourself an academic you are very confident in your knowledge of history of the field because you read hundreds of times the introductory paragraph.

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.")

Re: Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?

#28

Post by comboy »

arugulum wrote: post #17
BlackFly wrote: post #11

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. Then the history leaves out Nordstrom's contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going t…

I would love to read a deep dive into the history of (semi) modern science. In particular, one that would avoid pop-science analogies and that is unafraid of technical detail. Ideally one that is more focused on the intricacies and lineage of research than the particulars of researchers' personal lives. I feel that academics often have significant insight into the history of their own fields and personalities therein…

"What is real?" by Adam Becker. It doesn't touch much on general relativity if you are interested specifically in that, but it's a great read and gives you a bit of perspective how "modern" science works (I mean before the Internet, and back when we were actually moving forward..)

> Perhaps it's because matters can get quite political and subjective at that level.

Much more than I would have thought.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35604796-what-is-real

Post reply on HN