A FEW OF THE QUOTATIONS FROM THE BOOK
By Christopher Jon Bjerknes
"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. 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." – Harry Bateman
"All this was maintained by Poincare and others long before the time of Einstein, and one does injustice to truth in ascribing the discovery to him." -- Charles Nordmann "[Einstein's] paper 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper' in Annalen der Physik.
. . contains not a single reference to previous literature. It gives you the impression of quite a new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not true." -- Max Born
"In point of fact, therefore, Poincare was not only the first to enunciate the principle, but he also discovered in Lorentz's work the necessary mathematical formulation of the principle. All this happened before Einstein's paper appeared." -- G. H. Keswani
"Einstein's explanation is a dimensional disguise for Lorentz's. . . . Thus Einstein's theory is not a denial of, nor an alternative for, that of Lorentz. It is only a duplicate and disguise for it. . . . Einstein continually maintains that the theory of Lorentz is right, only he disagrees with his 'interpretation.' Is it not clear, therefore, that in this, as in other cases, Einstein's theory is merely a disguise for Lorentz's, the apparent disagreement about 'interpretation' being a matter of words only?" -- James Mackaye
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." -- Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein: Fabrication, Falsification, Plagiarism by Great Men of Science
A glance into the history of science reveals that cheating in science is not new; the issue of scientific charlatanism has haunted the scientific community for decades. Scientists have not spared any bad words to ridicule and belittle perpetual motion inventors, yet author would like to exercise his restrain not to use the word ‘fraud’ even for their big cases of plagiarism and cheating. Historians of science have uncovered cases of questionable conduct by some of the most famous scientists. Even Isaac Newton is alleged with faking calculations on the velocity of sound and on the precession of the equinoxes discrediting his contemporary. Sigmund Freud is said to have falsified practically all his case histories and he became more influential than any of his contemporary. While distinguishing between real science and pseudo-science, Popper treated Freudian psycho-analysis as a pseudo-science because psychoanalysis, he believed, could always protect itself against falsification:
It is clearly unethical to make selective use of scientific data to prove and establish some fact, theory or law. In the 1910s, Robert Milliken, great California physicist “measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops , and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air.” He discarded some measurements possibly because they didn't fit his hypothesis that electrons have a fixed or “quantized” charge. This was exposed by Gerald Holton, the Harvard science historian-physicist who had examined Milliken’s original lab notebooks in the 1970s. Nonetheless, Millikan’s Nobel was awarded “for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect.” Ironically, Millikan doubted his own conclusions for several decades. He himself was surprised when he got the Nobel Prize. It was an accomplishments that not even he fully believed in.[i]
Albert Einstein himself, early in his career, ignored an experiment that contradicted his theory of relativity. Later, Sir Arthur Eddington is said to have allegedly confirmed general relativity's prediction of the deflection of starlight under a gravitational field. In 1919, Eddington set out to measure how light was bent during a solar eclipse but the method he carried was so ambivalent and poorly performed that it was scientifically worthless[ii]. Eddington observed that some stars moved in the direction predicted by Einstein, but not as much, or too much, others had even moved in the opposite direction. Arthur Eddington had so much faith in the theory of general relativity that he altered his data to support it. Eddington discarded the data that didn't fit the prediction, and retained the data that did. Eddington intentionally rejected results of 16 photographic plates that didn’t support Einstein’s theory. Even worse, he then published his research without those 16 plates and showed how Einstein’s theory accurately predicted the resulting data. Eddington proudly announced the results at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society to an audience that had not actually seen the data first hand. According to the judgment of an eye witness, the meeting resembled a coronation ceremony rather than a scientific conference.[iii] The experiment was more or less a scientific fraud but it t helped launch the public acceptability of relativity and Einstein became a world celebrity overnight. Strangely enough, the experiment is still listed in current textbooks as “proof” of Einstein’s theory.
Questions of priority have long battled around the theories of relativity, both special and general. Einstein highly plagiarized the key ideas embodied in the equation E=MC2and Special Theory of Relativity are being talked very much as it is evident from large number of websites on net and noteworthy book “Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist by Christopher Jon Bjerknes.
About invention of E=MC2, why does this author think it was ‘product of plagiarism ?
- The Olinto De Pretto’s original formula E= MC2 first time appeared in science magazine in 1903.
- Einstein was aware of the De Pretto formula. Critics of Einstein claim that they have very strong evidence of these facts. Let me know, suppose you found your e mail id and account used by someone else, wouldn’t you think that someone has stolen your id and password. De Pretto is victim of same tragedy.
- All the key concepts of the Special Theory of Relativity, particularly popular equation E= MC2, the equivalence of matter and energy had previously been suggested by French mathematician Henri Poincare and Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz. Now historians also credit them while anticipating many of Einstein's discoveries but Einstein himself never gave them credit in the bibliography of his papers. I have in my possession his 1905 paper and also translated transcription of his talk “How I Created Theory of Relativity” delivered in German at Kyoto University on 14 December 1922. After a lapse of 17 years, he talked about Lorentz and how he built upon his ideas but it was not a credit timely given.
- Lot of Einstein’s love letters to Mileva, his wife, show her helping hand in making of relativity theory. Many speculate that it is also possible that Mileva actually worked out the equations that later made Einstein famous.
For above mentioned reasons, critics feel that it is unfortunate that peer view at Annalen der Physik was poor and if they had been competent enough, they would have out rightly rejected the Einstein paper without even reading it completely.
Can Einstein be plagiarist? I see several articles on net putting the evidence he was. What do you think?
Few quotes from Richard Moody Jr in his article “Albert Einstein: Plagiarist of the Century?”
“The most recognizable equation of all time is E=mc2. It is attributed by convention to be the sole province of Albert Einstein (1905). However, the conversion of matter into energy and energy into matter was known to Sir Isaac Newton ("Gross bodies and light are convertible into one another...", 1704). The equation can be attributed to S. Tolver Preston (1875), to Jules Henri Poincaré (1900; according to Brown, 1967) and to Olinto De Pretto (1904) before Einstein. Since Einstein never correctly derived E=mc2 (Ives, 1952), there appears nothing to connect the equation with anything original by Einstein.
Arthur Eddington's selective presentation of data from the 1919 eclipse so that it supposedly supported "Einstein's" general relativity theory is surely one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of the 20th century. His lavish support of Einstein corrupted the course of history. Eddington was less interested in testing a theory than he was in crowning Einstein the king of science.”
“Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was a great scientist who made a significant contribution to special relativity theory. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy website states that Poincaré: (1) "sketched a preliminary version of the special theory of relativity"; (2) "stated that the velocity of light is a limit velocity" (in his 1904 paper from the Bull. of Sci. Math. 28, Poincaré indicated "a whole new mechanics, where the inertia increasing with the velocity of light would become a limit and not be exceeded"); (3) suggested that "mass depends on speed"; (4) "formulated the principle of relativity, according to which no mechanical or electromagnetic experiment can discriminate between a state of uniform motion and a state of rest"; and (5) "derived the Lorentz transformation".
It is evident how deeply involved with special relativity Poincaré was. Even Keswani (1965) was prompted to say that "As far back as 1895, Poincaré, the innovator, had conjectured that it is impossible to detect absolute motion", and that "In 1900, he introduced 'the principle of relative motion' which he later called by the equivalent terms 'the law of relativity' and 'the principle of relativity' in his book, Science and Hypothesis, published in 1902". Einstein acknowledged none of this preceding theoretical work when he wrote his unreferenced 1905 paper.
“Einstein plagiarized the work of several notable scientists in his 1905 papers on special relativity and E=mc2, yet the physics community has never bothered to set the record straight."
In their book “Betrayers of the Truth” (Oxford University Press, 1985), William Broad and Nicholas Wade have provided ample evidence of fraud and deceit in science. They have presented a comprehensive analysis of the problem of fraud in science. They state:
“The claim of science to represent a reliable body of knowledge rests four-square on the assumption of objectivity, on the assertion that scientists are not influenced by their prejudices or are at least protected from them by the methodology of their discipline. Science is not an idealized interrogation of nature by dedicated servants of truth, but a human process governed by the ordinary human passions of ambition, pride and greed, as well as by all the well-hymned virtues attributed to men of science.”[iv]
Scientists have a tendency to ignore research in unconventional areas by accusing researchers of fraud and deceit, as is the case with perpetual motion and free energy, but Broad and Wade has observed that fraud is much most likely to be successful in mainstream, traditional areas of research. In controversial areas, a far greater degree of skepticism already prevails that keeps people more vigilant to scrutinize new ideas.
This is also one of the reasons why new ideas get often resisted. They explain:
“Acceptance of fraudulent results is the other side of that familiar coin, resistance to new ideas. …Fraudulent results are likely to be accepted in science if they are plausibly presented, if they conform with prevailing prejudices and expectations, and if they come from a suitably qualified scientists affiliated with an élite institution. It is for lack of all these qualities that new ideas in science are likely to be resisted.”[v]
In comparison to past, Nowadays science has become so cutthroat and so subjugated by corporate empires that many scientists have lost the freedom to take their own decisions and they repeatedly find themselves faced by uncomfortable ethical choices. Scientist is subject to many influences that include personal ambition, funding, prestige, rhetoric and political influence. It is hard for him to stick to ideal principles of science in his search for the truth. He is likely to get indulged in bad practice or get involved in scientific controversies. Because of this, self-image of scientists has been subject to much skeptical analysis in recent years.
In his article “Frauds in Science,” Wayne Jackson writes: “With a cultic-like aura surrounding them, these men and women are seen as the paragons of virtue in the intellectual community. They are a priesthood, arrayed in white apparel, tinkering with test tubes and peering through microscopes in a sophisticated “holy of holies.” I am speaking, of course, of the twentieth century scientist. He is not to be questioned as he pontificates upon matters that have baffled the intellects of the ages. His dogmatic theories are sacrosanct, and never are his motives suspect. Though this is quite a common notion in today’s world, it is woefully inaccurate. While it is true that there are many honest people working in the various fields of science, it also is only fair to point out that there have been, and likely will continue to be, some real charlatans in the scientific community.”[vi]
[i] From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
--Richard P. Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (1985)
[ii] P. Marmet, C. Couture, Relativistic Deflection of Light Near the Sun Using Radio Signals and Visible Light, Physics Essays 12, 1, p.162-173 (1999)
[iii] Ian McCausland, Anomalies in the History of Relativity, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 13, 2 (1999)
[iv] William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982; Alexander Kohn, False Prophets, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986.
[v] William Broad and Nicholas Wade, cited by http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/objectivity/tradition.htm
Also quoted in article The Objectivity of Science, The Traditional View, Does it Stand Examination?
[vi] Wayne Jackson, Biblical Studies in the Light of Archaeology
Wayne Jackson, The Mythology of Modern Geology, A Refutation of Evolution's Most Influential Argument, Apologetics Press, Inc
Cited by web site : Apologetics Press :: Sensible Science
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/1994
(Frauds in Science, Christian Courier: Archives,