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Debate about priority credit for the theory of special relativity
the dispute over the discovery of special relativity
Albert Einstein presented the theories of special relativity and general relativity in publications that either contained no formal references to previous literature, or referred only to a small number of his predecessors for fundamental results on which he based his theories, most notably to the work of Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz for special relativity, and to the work of David Hilbert, Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and Ernst Mach for general relativity. Subsequently, claims have been put forward about both theories, asserting that they were formulated, either wholly or in part, by others before Einstein. At issue is the extent to which Einstein and various other individuals should be credited for the formulation of these theories, based on priority considerations. Various scholars have questioned aspects of the work of Einstein, Poincaré, and Lorentz leading up to the theories’ publication in 1905. Questions raised by these scholars include asking to what degree Einstein was familiar with Poincaré's work, whether Einstein was familiar with Lorentz's 1904 paper or a review of it, and how closely Einstein followed other physicists at the time. It is known that Einstein was familiar with Poincaré's 1902 paper [Poi02], but it is not known to what extent he was familiar with other work of Poincaré in 1905. However, it is known that he knew [Poi00] in 1906, because he quoted it in [Ein06]. Lorentz's 1904 paper [Lor04] contained the transformations bearing his name that appeared in the Annalen der Physik. Some authors claim that Einstein worked in relative isolation and with restricted access to the physics literature in 1905. Others, however, disagree; a personal friend of Einstein, Maurice Solovine, acknowledged that he and Einstein pored over Poincaré's 1902 book, keeping them "breathless for weeks on end" [Rot06]. The question of whether Einstein's wife Mileva Marić contributed to Einstein's work has also been raised, but most scholars on the topic say that there is no substantive evidence that she made significant contributions. Also Einstein's first wife Mileva Marić, although her contribution is not considered to have any foundation according to serious scholars. In his History of the theories of ether and electricity from 1953, E. T. Whittaker claimed that relativity is the creation of Poincaré and Lorentz and attributed to Einstein's papers only little importance. However, most historians of science, like Gerald Holton, Arthur I. Miller, Abraham Pais, John Stachel, or Olivier Darrigol have other points of view. They admit that Lorentz and Poincaré developed the mathematics of special relativity, and many scientists originally spoke about the "Lorentz–Einstein theory". But they argue that it was Einstein who eliminated the classical ether and demonstrated the relativity of space and time. They also argue that Poincaré demonstrated the relativity of space and time only in his philosophical writings, but in his physical papers he maintained the ether as a privileged frame of reference that is perfectly undetectable, and continued (like Lorentz) to distinguish between "real" lengths and times measured by observers at rest within the aether, and "apparent" lengths and times measured by observers in motion within the aether. In 1904 he expanded that principle by saying: "The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for a stationary observer as for one carried along in a uniform motion of translation, so that we have no means, and can have none, of determining whether or not we are being carried along in such a motion." However, he also stated that we do not know if this principle will turn out to be true, but that it is interesting to determine what the principle implies. In 1900([Poi00]), Poincaré published a paper in which he said that radiation could be considered as a fictitious fluid with an equivalent mass of He derived this interpretation from Lorentz's 'theory of electrons' which incorporated Maxwell's radiation pressure. Poincaré had described a synchronization procedure for clocks at rest relative to each other in [Poi00] and again in [Poi04]. So two events, which are simultaneous in one frame of reference, are not simultaneous in another frame. It is very similar to the one later proposed by Einstein. However, Poincaré distinguished between "local" or "apparent" time of moving clocks, and the "true" time of resting clocks in the ether. In [Poi02] he argued that "some day, no doubt, the ether will be thrown aside as useless". Lorentz' paper [Lor04] containing the transformations bearing his name appeared in 1904. Albert Einstein in [Ein05c] derived the Lorentz equations by using the principle of constancy of velocity of light and the relativity principle. He was the first to argue that those principles (along with certain other basic assumptions about the homogeneity and isotropy of space, usually taken for granted by theorists) are sufficient to derive the theory—see Postulates of special relativity. He said: "The introduction of a luminiferous ether will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an absolutely stationary space provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place." * Einstein's Elektrodynamik paper [Ein05c] contains no formal references to other literature. It does mention, in §9, part II, that the results of the paper are in agreement with Lorentz's electrodynamics. Poincaré is not mentioned in this paper, although he is cited formally in a paper on special relativity written by Einstein the following year. In 1905 Einstein was the first to suggest that when a material body lost energy (either radiation or heat) of amount , its mass decreased by the amount Hermann Minkowski showed in 1907 that the theory of special relativity could be elegantly described using a four dimensional spacetime, which combines the dimension of time with the three dimensions of space. Einstein in 1920 returned to a concept of aether having no state of motion.

In several papers, Elie Zahar (1983, 2000) Peter Galison compared the approaches of both Poincaré and Einstein to reformulate the concepts of space and time. He wrote: "Did Einstein really discover relativity? Did Poincaré already have it? These old questions have grown as tedious as they are fruitless." This is because it depends on the question, which parts of relativity one considers as essential: the rejection of the aether, the Lorentz transformation, the connection with the nature of space and time, predictions of experimental results, or other parts. For Galison, it is more important to acknowledge that both thinkers were concerned with clock synchronization problems, and thus both developed the new operational meaning of simultaneity. However, while Poincaré followed a constructive approach and still adhered to the concepts of Lorentz's stationary aether and the distinction between "apparent" and "true" times, Einstein abandoned the aether and therefore all times in different inertial frames are equally valid. Galison argued that this does not mean that Poincaré was conservative, since Poincaré often alluded to the revolutionary character of the "new mechanics" of Lorentz.