> A theory of Einstein the irrational plagiarist
> Christopher Jon Bjerknes - The Canberra Times September 19, 2006
>
> The name "Einstein" evokes images of a good-humoured genius, who
> revolutionised our concepts of space, time, energy, mass and motion.
> Time named Albert Einstein "person of the century". The language
> itself has incorporated "Einstein" into our common vocabulary as a
> synonym for extraordinary brilliance. Many consider Einstein to have
> been the finest mind in recorded human history.
>
> That is the popular image, fostered by textbooks, the media, and hero
> worshiping physicists and historians. However, when one reads the
> scientific literature written by Einstein's contemporaries, a quite
> different picture emerges: one of an irrational plagiarist, who
> manipulated credit for their work.
>
> Einstein is perhaps most famous for the special theory of relativity,
> published in 1905 in the German physics journal, Annalen der Physik.
> The paper was devoid of references, a fact that Einstein's friend and
> Nobel prize winner for physics, Max Born, found troubling.
>
> "The striking point is that it contains not a single reference to
> previous literature," Born stated in 1955, before the International
> Relativity Conference in Bern. "It gives you the impression of quite a
> new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not
> true."
>
> Though Einstein's 1905 article contained no references, it was so
> strikingly similar to a paper written by Hendrik Lorentz the previous
> year, that Walter Kaufmann and Max Planck felt a need to publicly
> point out that Einstein had merely provided a metaphysical
> reinterpretation and generalisation of Lorentz' scientific theory, a
> metaphysical reinterpretation and generalisation Henri Poincare had
> already published.
>
> As Charles Nordmann, astronomer to the Paris Observatory, pointed out:
> "It is really to Henri Poincare, the great Frenchman whose death has
> left a void that will never be filled, that we must accord the merit
> of having first proved, with the greatest lucidity and the most
> prudent audacity, that time and space, as we know them, can only be
> relative. A few quotations from his works will not be out of place.
> They will show that the credit for most of the things which are
> currently attributed to Einstein is, in reality, due to Poincare."
>
> Einstein acknowledged the fact, but justified his plagiarism in a
> cavalier fashion in Annalen der Physik in 1907. "It appears to me that
> it is the nature of the business that what follows has already been
> partly solved by other authors. Despite that fact, since the issues of
> concern are here addressed from a new point of view, I believe I am
> entitled to leave out a thoroughly pedantic survey of the literature,
> all the more so because it is hoped that these gaps will yet be filled
> by other authors, as has already happened with my first work on the
> principle of relativity through the commendable efforts of Mr. Planck
> and Mr. Kaufmann."
>
> The completed field equations of the general theory of relativity were
> first deduced by David Hilbert, a fact Einstein was forced to
> acknowledge in 1916, after he had plagiarised them from Hilbert in
> late 1915. Paul Gerber solved the problem of the perihelion of Mercury
> in 1898. Physicist Ernst Gehrcke gave a lecture on the theory of
> relativity in the Berlin Philharmonic on August 24, 1920, and publicly
> confronted Einstein, who was in attendance, with Einstein's plagiarism
> of Lorentz' mathematical formalisms of the special theory of
> relativity, Palagyi's space-time concepts, Varicak's non-Euclidean
> geometry and of the plagiarism of the mathematical solution of the
> problem of the perihelion of Mercury first arrived at by Gerber.
> Gehrcke addressed Einstein to his face and told the crowd that the
> emperor had no clothes.
>
> This was Einstein's response published in the Berliner Tageblatt und
> Handels-Zeitung on August 27, 1920, translated into English in the
> book Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity edited by Gerald
> E. Tauber: ". . . Gerber, who has given the correct formula for the
> perihelion motion of Mercury before I did. The experts are not only in
> agreement that Gerber's derivation is wrong through and through, but
> the formula cannot be obtained as a consequence of the main assumption
> made by Gerber. Mr Gerber's work is therefore completely useless, an
> unsuccessful and erroneous theoretical attempt.
>
> "I maintain that the theory of general relativity has provided the
> first real explanation of the perihelion motion of mercury. I have not
> mentioned the work by Gerber originally, because I did not know it
> when I wrote my work on the perihelion motion of Mercury; even if I
> had been aware of it, I would not have had any reason to mention it."
>
> The fact that Einstein was a plagiarist is common knowledge in the
> physics community. What isn't so well-known is that the sources
> Einstein parroted were also largely unoriginal. In 1919, writing in
> the Philosophical Magazine Harry Bateman, a British mathematician and
> physicist who had emigrated to the United States, unsuccessfully
> sought acknowledgment of his work.
>
> "The appearance of Dr Silberstein's recent article on General
> Relativity without the Equivalence Hypothesis encourages me to restate
> my own views on the subject," Bateman wrote.
>
> "I am perhaps entitled to do this as my work on the subject of general
> relativity was published before that of Einstein and Kottler, and
> appears to have been overlooked by recent writers."
>
> My book is a documentation of Einstein's plagiarism of the theory of
> relativity. It discloses his method for manipulating credit for the
> work of his contemporaries, reprints the prior works he parroted, and
> demonstrates that he could not have drawn his conclusions without
> prior knowledge of the works he copied but failed to reference.
>
> Numerous republished quotations from Einstein's contemporaries prove
> that they were aware of his plagiarism. Side-by-side comparisons of
> Einstein's words juxtaposed to those of his predecessors prove the
> almost verbatim repetition. There is even substantial evidence
> presented in the book that Einstein plagiarised the work of his first
> wife, Mileva Maric, who had plagiarised others.
>
> Mr Bjerknes, an American historian of science, has authored six books
> on Einstein and the theory of relativity. Albert Einstein: The
> Incorrigible Plagiarist (ISBN 0971962987) is available atwww.amazon.com
>
> http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?story_id=179892&y=2002&m=...