Mileva Einstein responsible for E=MC squared?

ah "the power behind the 'throne'"...thanx for the cd marquesa!

Too bad wifey's formula was CE=M.
Cook the Eggs over Medium

Total bullsh*t.
E = mc2 was discovered by Mathematician Poincare, not by Einstein, along with the invariance of movement of an object in 4D space (i.e. both fundamental equations of restrained relativity). Einstein expanded from that, and later found(ed) the general relativity.
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All in all, when looking at Einstein's life from this perspective it seems he was not quite the 'good' man... and his wife's life was more of a tragedy than anything else. So much for fame and success... :notsure:

Cor, is your name Stalin by any chance, this is the sort of revisionist rewriting of history from partisan attitudes normally associated with the former CCCP.

While Jules Henri Poincaré was most certainly a great universalist mathematician, he is probably best known for his work on Newtons 3 body problem, diophantine equations and of course the Poincaré Conjecture.

He certainly did some work on the Special Theory of Relativity but that was AFTER Einstein (or Mrs Einstein) had formulated it.

No that was not after. He first published 3 months before Einstein did in 1905. The problem is that he did so in a mathematical review, not a physics review. Now Einstein certainly discovered it in parallel, but still, the first to have discovered it is Poincaré. One reason why Einstein wasn't given a Nobel prize for relativity in 1914 was Lorentz pointed out Poincar" had found it before Einstein. You can also check what Poincare said in Missouri in 1904. The so-called Lorentz transform has been attributed to Lorentz by Poincare, and Lorentz pointed it out that although he had found the general family of equations, Poincare found the one that fit the theory. Einstein probably discovered the theory independently, but later, and thanks to Lorents' work which was done in part in collaboration with Poincare. Einstein managed to explain and defend the theory, while Poincare was unable to. Einstein later found the general relativity, and was the only one to do this.

So Poincarre found a nice Mathematical set of equations but Einstein found the same equations and gave them a physical context. Sounds like credit should go to the Einsteins for the real discovery then.

Poincare gave them a physical meaning. He suggested in 1904 that a new physics should be made where the celerity of light would be an upper limit. That is really physical meaning. Poincarre was however tagged as a mathematician, and the physicists refused to consider him as a physicist, which is exactly what you are doing. As a result of that, they hardly read him or listened to him. Einstein has to be given credit for the madd-media work he did around it and for the genial generalised relativity. He was also givne a Nobel prize for his work on quantum physics, but didn't receive it for relativity because such a prize would at least have had to be shared with Poincare.

Hence, the discovery is correctly attributed to Einstein.

Don't forget that Lorentz made major contributions too. No scientific discovery is made in a vacuum. Though I'm not sure why it matters at this point which dead person gets primary credit for the theory.


This was interesting:

http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s8-08/8-08.htm

"In a sense, the failure of Poincare to found the modern theory of relativity was not due to a lack of discernment on his part (he clearly recognized the Lorentz group of space and time transformations), but rather to an excess of discernment and philosophical sophistication, preventing him from subscribing to the young patent examiner's inspired but perhaps slightly naive enthusiasm for the symmetrical interpretation, which is, after all, only one of infinitely many possibilities. Poincare recognized too well the extent to which our physical models are both conventional and provisional. In retrospect, Poincare's scruples have the appearance of someone arguing that we could just as well regard the Earth rather than the Sun as the center of the solar system, i.e., his reservations were (and are) technically valid, but in some sense misguided."


Adding to that: this really matches my experiences with mathematicians and physicists. Mathematicians think that theoretical physicists are too sloppy in their thinking, while physicists think that mathematicians worry too much about irrelevancies.
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It's like Newton really. He's credited with discovering gravity when the idea had been circulating for quite some time. Newton merely realised how gravity affected celestial objects like the moon.

Poincare came up with a hypothesis, Einstein came up with the theory. So discovery is correctly attributed to Einstein

A mathemetician's view of the sciences.

If it bites you it's biology
If it stinks it's chemistry
And if it doesn't work it's physics.

Three men are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a canyon somewhere. One of the three men says, "I've got an idea. We can call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices far." So he leans over the basket and yells out, "Helllloooooo! Where are we?" (They hear the echo several times.) 15 minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo! You're lost!!" One of the men says, "That must have been a mathematician." Puzzled, one of the other men asks, "Why do you say that?" The reply: "For three reasons. (1) he took a long time to answer, (2) he was absolutely correct, and (3) his answer was absolutely useless."

Fair enough, I must say I felt a bit guilty about the tone of my earlier message, but hell it was Friday afternoon & I was bored!
The points made by others that the interpretation of the theory rather than the formulation was the greater acheivment are almost certainly true.
But there is still a valid point about revisionism, for example; ask a German who invented Calculus and they'll say Leibnitz (spelling?) while everyone else would say Newton, ask a Brazilian or Russian who was the first to acheive powered flight and Wright would not be the name given.

Of course there are many examples of parallel development (Newton/Leibnitz being a good example), in a similar vein as in the original post there are many times where an important contibution was ignored because of the gender of the worker, almost everybody has heard of Crick and Watson, but how many know about Rosalind Franklin whos work on X-ray crystalography on hydrated DNA gave the vital structural clues to Crick & Watson when they peeked at her work without her permission, and so on ad nauseum..........