In the history of special relativity, the most important names that are mentioned in discussions about the distribution of credit are Albert Einstein, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré, and Hermann Minkowski.
In addition, polemics exist about alleged contributions of others such as Olinto De Pretto who according to some mathematical scholars did not create relativity but was the first to use the equation.
[1] 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.
[3] 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".
[B 1][B 2][B 3][B 4][B 5] Darrigol summarizes: Most of the components of Einstein's paper appeared in others' anterior works on the electrodynamics of moving bodies.
In one we use – such was my thought – coordinate axes which have a fixed position in the aether and which we can call "true" time; in the other system, on the contrary, we would deal with simple auxiliary quantities whose introduction is only a mathematical artifice.
Poincaré, on the contrary, obtained a perfect invariance of the equations of electrodynamics, and he formulated the "postulate of relativity", terms which he was the first to employ.
[...] Let us add that by correcting the imperfections of my work he never reproached me for them.However, a 1916 reprint of his main work "The theory of electrons" contains notes (written in 1909 and 1915) in which Lorentz sketched the differences between his results and that of Einstein as follows:[11] [p. 230]: the chief difference [is] that Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced, with some difficulty and not altogether satisfactorily, from the fundamental equations of the electromagnetic field.
The well known historian of science, Jürgen Renn, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, wrote on Einstein's contributions to the Annalen der Physik:[14] The Annalen also served as a source of modest additional income for Einstein, who wrote more than twenty reports for its Beiblätter – mainly on the theory of heat – thus demonstrating an impressive mastery of the contemporary literature.
In 1909[17] and 1912[18] Einstein explained:[B 8] ...it is impossible to base a theory of the transformation laws of space and time on the principle of relativity alone.
Einstein wrote in 1953:[B 9] There is no doubt, that the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905.
Lorentz had already recognized that the transformations named after him are essential for the analysis of Maxwell's equations, and Poincaré deepened this insight still further.
[...] The new feature of it was the realization of the fact that the bearing of the Lorentz transformation transcended its connection with Maxwell's equations and was concerned with the nature of space and time in general.
A further new result was that the "Lorentz invariance" is a general condition for any physical theory.This section cites notable publications where people have expressed a view on the issues outlined above.
In 1954, Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker, an English mathematician and historian of science, credited Henri Poincaré with the equation
On the other hand, Holton argued that Poincaré and Lorentz still adhered to the stationary aether concept, and tried only to modify Newtonian dynamics, not to replace it.
Einstein's views on space and time and the abandonment of the aether were, according to Holton, not acceptable to Poincaré, therefore the latter only referred to Lorentz as the creator of the "new mechanics".
Miller (1973, 1981)[B 2] agreed with the analysis of Holton and Goldberg, and further argued that although the terminology (like the principle of relativity) used by Poincaré and Einstein were very similar, their content differs sharply.
According to Miller, Poincaré used this principle to complete the aether based "electromagnetic world view" of Lorentz and Abraham.
[p. 91–92] In his 1982 Einstein biography Subtle is the Lord,[B 3] Abraham Pais argued that Poincaré "comes near" to discovering special relativity (in his St. Louis lecture of September 1904, and the June 1905 paper), but eventually he failed, because in 1904 and also later in 1909, Poincaré treated length contraction as a third independent hypothesis besides the relativity principle and the constancy of the speed of light.
According to Pais, Poincaré thus never understood (or at least he never accepted) special relativity, in which the whole theory including length contraction can simply be derived from two postulates.
Although he was apparently trying to make a point concerning Whittaker's treatment of the origin of special relativity, Pais' phrasing of that statement was rebuked by at least one notable reviewer of his 1982 book as being "scurrilous" and "lamentable".
[23] Also in contrast to Pais' overgeneralized claim, notable scientists such as Max Born refer to parts of Whittaker's second volume, especially the history of quantum mechanics, as "the most amazing feats of learning, insight, and discriminations"[24] while Freeman Dyson says of the two volumes of Whittaker's second edition: "it is likely that this is the most scholarly and generally authoritative history of its period that we shall ever get.
He said that "though Whittaker was unjust towards Einstein, his positive account of Poincaré's actual achievement contains much more than a simple grain of truth".
According to him, it was Poincaré's unsystematic and sometimes erroneous statements regarding his philosophical papers (often connected with conventionalism), which hindered many to give him due credit.
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.
In his view, this contradicts the claims that Einstein worked in relative isolation and with limited access to the scientific literature.
Harvey R. Brown (2005)[B 21] (who favors a dynamical view of relativistic effects similar to Lorentz, but "without a hidden aether frame") wrote about the road to special relativity from Michelson to Einstein in section 4: Regarding Lorentz's work before 1905, Brown wrote about the development of Lorentz's "theorem of corresponding states" and then continued: Then the contribution of Poincaré's to relativity: However, Brown continued with the reasons which speak against crediting Poincaré with co-discovery: Brown denies the idea of other authors and historians that the major difference between Einstein and his predecessors is Einstein's rejection of the aether, because it is always possible to add for whatever reason the notion of a privileged frame to special relativity as long as one accepts that it will remain unobservable, and also Poincaré argued that "some day, no doubt, the aether will be thrown aside as useless".
That is, Poincaré preferred Lorentz covariance over Galilei covariance when it is about phenomena accessible to experimental tests; yet in terms of space and time, Poincaré preferred Galilei spacetime over Minkowski spacetime, and length contraction and time dilation "are merely apparent phenomena due to motion with respect to the ether".