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

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

#61

Post by debatem1 »

gjm11 wrote: post #47
debatem1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minkowski blew my mind when I fist started to understand his work. Without a doubt the most useful pieces of math I learned after multiplication, and more intuitive even than that.

What work in particular? Minkowski did a lot of neat things. (But I'm not sure I'd describe any of the ones I know of as more intuitive than multiplication.)

His work on the geometry of numbers. It was like a secret decoder ring for the language of higher math at the time, while being both elegant and tangible. Compare to multiplication, which occasionally still bears strangely shaped fruit for me even today.

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

#62

Post by gjm11 »

drfuchs wrote: post #59
gjm11 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit misleading. (Not deliberately, I'm sure.) When Russell published the same result later, here's one thing he said: "The most important previous determination of the abundance of the elements by astrophysical means is that by Miss Payne, who determined, by Milne's method of marginal appearances, the relative abundance of eighteen of the most important elements." He shows Payne's figures and remarks on how…

Right, and he did not include her as a co-author of his paper. That's dirty pool in the academic world. As for who typically gets credit, yes, I think you'd get a different result if you ask astronomers and astro-physicists who are over 50 years old, or anyone who hung around science museums and planetariums in the 1960's or 70's, or check out old popular science books and magazines, or the Journal for the History of…

Why should Payne have been a coauthor of Russell's paper?

It was (so far as I can tell) entirely independent work on the same question. She deserved a citation (which she got) and acknowledgement that she had got numbers very similar to his (which she got), but you don't make someone a coauthor just because you and they are working on the same problem.

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

#65

Post by BlackFly »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #56
BlackFly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don't buy that narrative. I think that Einstein's special relativity paper showed how the mathematics followed from first principles. Neither Lorentz nor Poincare did that. They may have had the mathematics that worked, they may have had it first. But Einstein told us why .

Which first principle exactly? Because they were already stating that the speed of light would be constant in all frames which is the only thing necessary to derive special relativity. Lorentz derived the transformations precisely to describe this fact!

Certainly not the lack of the aether; while it isn't necessary to describe relativity it isn't precluded either and cosmic time is a thing today. The spacetime we live in is a thing describable in its own right, on large scales it has a preferred time direction.

He was responsible for spreading those ideas, but he certainly wasn't the first one to express them. It is still respectful to give him credit for the spread of these ideas, but we don't need to pretend like Lorentz and Poincare were blind men fumbling around in the dark until he came along in order to justify our reverence.

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

#66

Post by BlackFly »

soVeryTired wrote: post #26
BlackFly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was thinking of this indeed, but felt I was already becoming a bit long winded. ;)
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