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Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

Anti-Einstein sentiment surfaces again

01 Apr 2003

Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist
Christopher Jon Bjerknes
2002 XTX Inc 408pp $19.95pb

Under attack

One’s first reaction to books like this is to follow Virgil’s advice about the trimmers in hell: “Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by” (Dante Inferno III 51). Yet there are reasons for reviewing this book in spite of its lack of originality or intellectual merit. Its author has gained a certain notoriety as the result of his indefatigable – not to say monomaniacal – efforts to indict Einstein as an “incorrigible plagiarist”.

By his own claim, this is the author’s sixth book on the subject of Einstein’s work on the special and general theories of relativity. (A search of the Internet, however, turned up no record of the other five.) Its publication by a “vanity publisher” has brought Bjerknes appearances at bookstores, articles in newspapers and magazines, recommendations on several websites, to mention just a few of the 355 items that a search on Google did reveal.

The book is of interest as the latest manifestation of an undercurrent of hostility towards Einstein that has run for almost 90 years, surfacing from time to time. Since the inception of the theories of relativity – both special and general – Einstein and his work have been attacked on the basis of numerous physical and philosophical misunderstandings and/or prejudices, quite often tinged with various versions of anti-Semitism.

Relativity has been attacked in the name of US pragmatism, German idealism, English Hegelianism, French Bergsonianism (by fellow Jew Henri Bergson!), Soviet “diamat” (dialectical materialism) and Nazi “Deutsche Physik” (German physics), to name but a few of the high-minded (and not so high-minded) points of the compass from which such attacks have originated over the years.

So it seems worthwhile to review such a book – if only to be reminded that the current still runs strong – and to highlight the need for caution in uncritically accepting the claims of such “objective” attacks on Einstein. (I hasten to add that serious critical scrutiny of any person or theory is always welcome.)

This book is primarily an industrious compilation of citations taken from various points of the intellectual compass. Well over half of the book consists of quotations in English and in various original languages, with source notes – all duly accurate as far as I checked. The one glaring exception is of a supposed quotation from Einstein that appears on the front cover of the book – “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” – for which no source is given. This liberal helping of quotations is seasoned with the author’s own comments, examples of which are given below.

The citations fall into three broad classes. First, there are those from the traditional anti-Einstein literature. They range from Nobel-prize winners, like Johannes Stark and Philip Lenard, through run-of-the-mill physicists such as Ernst Gehrke, to out-and-out confidence tricksters, like Paul Weyland, to name but some of those cited from the Weimar Republic days. Bjerknes does not cite their anti-Semitic outbursts or mention their Nazi connections, nor does he cite any of the extensive literature from the Nazi era that attempted to salvage the special theory (while savaging Einstein) by attributing it to the “Aryans” Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Henri Poincaré. He does cite Sir Edmund Whittaker, Herbert Ives, and many other non-Germans who made similar attacks without any public anti-Semitic comments.

Apparently, it does not bother Bjerknes that the various opponents of the special and general theories that he cites attack relativity from mutually contradictory viewpoints. Nor does he seem to realize the incongruity of endorsing claims that Einstein’s theories are wrong as well as claims that they were plagiarized from valid sources! The culmination of Bjerknes’s uncritical piling of name upon name is found on pages 231-233, which constitute two full pages of names, ranging from the famous – like Gauss and John Locke – to unknowns like Pavannini and Caldonazzi, all of whom are cited as having made unnamed (but referenced) “contributions toward the general theory of relativity”.

In the second main category of citations, Bjerknes cites carefully chosen excerpts from numerous valuable accounts of the development of relativity theory that discuss the role of Lorentz, Poincaré and many others. These researchers carried out work on the optics and electrodynamics of moving bodies that helped to create the intellectual atmosphere that led to the formulation of the special theory.

The author, however, takes any hint that Einstein did not work in an intellectual vacuum as proof positive that he was a plagiarist – as if any scientific creation is a purely individual activity. Einstein himself acknowledged that the special theory of relativity would soon have been formulated without him, while claiming (correctly I believe) that, in his absence, the general theory would not have been so easy to arrive at. Indeed, Bjerknes has a much harder time producing evidence of Einstein’s “plagiarism” of the general theory, a topic I shall not discuss.

I will mention just one example of the author’s method of citation: his treatment of Wolfgang Pauli, in which case we are fortunate in having additional information. Writing of Einstein’s role in the development of special relativity, Bjerknes argues: “In 1921 Wolfgang Pauli set the record straight in the Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften.” He then cites extensively – but not completely – Pauli’s comments on the roles of Woldemar Voigt, Lorentz, Poincaré and Einstein in developing some of the key concepts in the now-standard version of the special theory.

The author concludes: “After giving Poincaré his due credit, and acknowledging that Einstein holds no priority for the special theory of relativity, Pauli, half-heartedly, pays the seemingly obligatory homage to Einstein the then recently emerged celebrity [by writing] ‘It was Einstein, finally, who in a way completed the basic formulation of this new discipline.'”. Bjerknes then adds: “It appears that Pauli was forced, or felt compelled, to praise Einstein with additional inappropriate and, evidently, insincere comments.”

But what if we consult letters that were sent to Pauli by Felix Klein – the renowned German mathematician who orchestrated the Encyklopädie? It emerges from these letters that indeed “Pauli was forced, or felt compelled” by Klein – although not to praise Einstein more, but to say more about the role of Poincaré and Lorentz! Similarly, Klein asked Pauli to give more credit to Hilbert in his discussion of the origins of the general theory (see Wolfgang Pauli 1979 Scientific Correspondence with Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, a.o. Volume 1 1919-1929 (Springer, Berlin)).

Lest Bjerknes now seize upon these letters as evidence against Einstein, let me hasten to add that in them Klein evaluates Einstein’s work most highly. He refers to Einstein as “a genius” and points out that “[t]here still remains enough [credit] in this connection for Einstein”. Klein also exonerates him from any role in the public hullabaloo: “In his personal comments Einstein is always so lovable, quite in contrast to the insane publicity that is set in motion in his honour.”

Finally, let us see what Pauli says in full about Einstein in his Encyklopädie article. After the sentence cited by Bjerknes above, Pauli continues: “[Einstein’s] paper of 1905 was submitted at almost the same time as Poincaré’s article and had been written without previous knowledge of Lorentz’s paper of 1904. It includes not only all the essential results contained in the other two papers, but shows an entirely novel, and much more profound understanding of the whole problem. This will now be demonstrated in detail.”

No wonder Bjerknes does not cite the whole passage!

In the final category of citations in this book, Bjerknes refers many times to the more recent anti-Einstein literature, claiming that Einstein plagiarized the ideas of his first wife, Mileva Einstein-Maric. I have published extensive discussions of this claim – see, for example, “Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric: a scientific collaboration that failed to develop”, which appears in my book Einstein from B to Z (2002 Birkhäuser). I will, therefore, cite just a couple of examples of the intellectual level of Bjerknes’s arguments. Since the author claims that the work – no matter who did it – is plagiarized, he ends up with statements that would be truly ludicrous were they not an insult to a woman who deserves better.

On pages 214-215, for example, Bjerknes writes: “Mileva once hinted to Albert that she was contemplating publishing her memoirs. Albert told her to keep her mouth shut, and may have intimated that he, an innocent idiot, would suffer less than she, the incorrigible plagiarist…What would Mileva have stood to gain by revealing that Albert had taken credit for her work, when she herself had merely repeated what others had already published?”

His discussion of the agreement that the pair came to as part of their divorce settlement – namely that Albert would give Mileva the Nobel-prize money, should he receive that prize – is in a similar vein. “If one thief steals a stolen purse from another thief, then offers to split the purse,” he writes, ” what option does either thief have, but to keep silent and spend the money?”

But our author does endeavour to be fair minded. On page 217 he writes: “Did Albert have no choice but to copy what others had published before him, if indeed he ever actually did? Was he of sub-average intelligence? Given that this issue is still controversial, I’ll give Albert the benefit of the doubt and regard the 1905 paper [on special relativity] as a co-authored work.”

I opened with a quotation from Dante’s Divine Comedy. I will close with one from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer: “Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.”

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