Talk:Relativity priority dispute/Archive 1

message: "According to Bjerknes, a former Vice President of the Russian [Soviet] Academy of Sciences and currently Director of the Institute for High Energy Physics. Author of a book about Poincarés relativity theory. Coauthor, with Mestvirishvili and Petrov, of an article refuting the Corry/Renn/Stachel paper. They discuss both Einstein's and Hilbert's papers, claiming that Einstein and Hilbert arrived at the correct field equations independently."
This needs to be rewritten. It reads as if Bjerknes, author of "Einstein -- The Incorrigible Plagiarist", is a former Vice President, etc., etc., and the first sentence has no verb. green 64.136.26.226 05:25, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Anatoly Alexeevich Logunov

message: This section has an excellent quote from "The Mystery of the Einstein-Poincaré Connection", but who's the author? The book(?) isn't in Amazon's catalogue. green 65.88.65.217 04:45, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Special Relativity by 1905

message: :There's an additional article on the subject of the Hilbert proofs recently published by Tilman Sauer in Archive for History of Exact Sciences ("What is missing on page 8 of the proofs for Hilbert's First Communication on the Foundations of Physics?"). If anybody wants a copy, send me an e-mail (fastfission@gmail.com). My brief skimming of it indicates that Sauer attempts to figure out what is missing in a very systematic way, and concludes that it is highly unlikely that they contain the Einstein equations. --Fastfission 22:05, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Any attempt to reconstruct this missing piece involves some sort of speculation. In this case, I do not see why Sauer should have a stronger case than Wuensch, who takes text from Hilbert's lectures about the subject. In addition, CRS should have informed their readers that their argument involved a speculation about the content of the missing quarter page, which means that they cannot really decide the priority issue, contrary to what they claim in the title.De kludde 03:25, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not saying Sauer is "correct", but was merely adding it to the pile of things, and offering to send a copy to anyone who wants one. Sauer is an established figure in the history of relativity, so his POV is relevant here, and I was pointing it out simply because it seems to have been overlooked. I think the NPOV approach to the question of "what was in the missing part of the proofs?" is that nobody really knows and there are a number of solutions that experts in the subject think are plausible.  --Fastfission 01:48, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article by Sauer on the Hilbert proofs

message: If that can't be backed up by a direct, unambiguous quote from himself, the title is unsupportable for Wikipedia (even apart of the foregoing subject). Harald88 21:46, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the SRT name was coined by Einstein in connection with the search for a more general relativity theory (one that would include gravitation). I'm not sure at what point the name "relativity" was attached to it - others will certainly know better. --Alvestrand 20:23, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I remember that: he labeled relativity theory "SRT" in 1916 (it's online), because he relabeled the PoR then "Special Principle of Relativity"; he there did not claim that he was the first or only author of SRT (just as whoever labeled Newton's theory "classical mechanics" wasn't its author!). Harald88 06:53, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Did Einstein make a claim to SRT? 

message: Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages
I have now renamed this article per the discussion, and linked it into the Einstein, Hilbert, History of SR and History of GR articles. I can't link it into Poincaré - that page is still protected. I think the page can still be improved - but I think it carries useful information, so it's now worth linking. --Alvestrand 09:31, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Being bold - page moved and linked 

message: Too many! Really, subsections would be better. Charles Matthews 16:10, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Which section(s)? There seems to be a lot of small facts that people think important here - one could reformat some of them in paragraphs rather than bullet points, but I think it's hard to subhead very many of them - the article already has a lot of sections. --Alvestrand 21:50, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I think it should go back - the article deserves mention on the Hilbert page - but it was featured as a "main article" link in a section whose title was specifically about the priority dispute, not what the mathematics was about. I put the link back into the section as a "see here for the mathematics" - feel free to move it about! --Alvestrand 22:45, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Bullet points

message: I've changed the Hilbert quote a bit. Old version was: "Einstein kehrt schließlich in seinen letzten Publikationen geradewegs zu meiner Theorie zurück" - after looking around in the Web, the best I could get for a real quote was "Einstein kehrt schließlich in seinen letzten Publikationen geradewegs zu den Gleichungen meiner Theorie zurück" - not quite the same thing. I added the citation data to references, but this was from Licorne, and I haven't matched it to an online version yet, so it needs checking. --Alvestrand 07:00, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Note - the mangled quote on this page was added by De Kludde, not by Licorne. The text, in both German and English, can be found on Talk:Albert Einstein/Hilbert1924. --Alvestrand 08:14, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hilbert "Meiner theorie" sentence 

message: Just so that I can find it again - if someone wonders what "Brit J Phil Sci" means, there's a page that explains it all, at least for some of them: . But it didn't have the full name of "Rep. Bog. Phys." - help? --Alvestrand 10:53, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link for finding out what journals' names are 

message: I removed the "White Nationalist Wiki" account of the dispute. I don't find it useful and I think it's probably one of the worst sources one could imagine using -- this is a webpage whose About statement says that it is to create a "wiki free from the strong Jewish bias dominating the classical Wikipedia." That's not the language of a reliable source, in my opinion. 
Also, it might be worth pointing out that the page on the WN Wiki was written by a user with the name of De kludde. Coincidence? Seems pretty unlikely. He's also the one who wrote the "About" statement. Sigh. 
I know the user who posted it was probably not implying it was a good source, but I just felt it was worthwhile to explain my reasons for removing it. I don't think Holocaust deniers are really a great source for answering complicated historical question involving the prominence of a Jewish physicist. The user who posted it may have in fact included it as a way of showing what the White Nationalist account was -- even in that role I don't think it is very good, since 1. it was written entirely by one user (one who has been editing on this page as well), and 2. it is not a published source on it (if one wants to get the White Nationalist take on Einstein, there is plenty written on the Deutsche Physik movement as it is). Just my two cents! --Fastfission 22:29, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually I'm the one who added it. Not in order to make people believe it - but in order to point out that some people hold a completely different view of the world. NPOV. Of course, my personal hope would be for people to look at that wiki and recoil in horror..... but you're probably right in the argument for removing it. --Alvestrand 22:37, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Oops -- you were talking about the text I copied, not about the link in the references. The reason for the text was different - I wanted to get the author names and page numbers, so that we could distribute them around the article, but didn't do the distribution work myself. Laziness - but it's almost midnight here. --Alvestrand 22:45, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a difficult issue.  A well-known (and, sadly, often-validated) principle says that anything on the WWW is doomed as soon as Nazi's (White Nationalists probably count) are mentioned.  OTH, to properly understand the full context of some contemporary and modern ad hominem attacks on Einstein, one needs to see the ugly language used by this type of writer.  So there is strong case to made for and against including these links.  Barf. ---CH 05:19, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Then it's alright if I add the Ku Klux Klan's version of black history to the pages on Martin Luther King and so forth. NPOV. We must repesent all sides equally. Nonsense. This is epistemological relativism or radical skepticism. What if I decided to put up a site dedicted to the idea that Eienstin never existed?? Shall I add the view of the flat eart h society to all the astronomy pages??--Lacatosias 09:39, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I'd think that a link to the Ku Klux Klan's version of black history would be appropriate under Historical revisionism (negationism) - but definitely not on Martin Luther King! The existence of revisionism is a fact, and Wikipedia is about documenting facts - but I'll certainly try to document the existence with due reference to the sources that have made me not believe it! --Alvestrand 09:49, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure. Of course it should be documented. But I often hear the interpretaion of NPOV as the idea that all views need to be accorded equal merit. For example, The choice of sources might, in itself, provoke someone to suggest that the people who write these alleged facts are 3 jews, four portuese and 1 Italian. Therefore, we need to belance this spurce with one that has 3 Nigerians, 4 Greman, etc.. And we end up with endless nonsense. --Lacatosias 10:13, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we're in violent agreement. --Alvestrand 10:25, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

text: The idea that Einstein has done only part of the things for which he is famous (eg, that Poincare and Lorentz did much or most of SRT, and Hilbert did the field equations of GRT) has better supporters (Logunov, Winterberg, Whittaker) than flat earth or related nonsense.De kludde 10:19, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough. But then it is these particualr authors and their credentials (I'm not suuficently specialized in theis area to judge them) which should be included and discussed in the artcile, not the White Nationalist Wikipeaid or someone who is writing exclusivelt for the White Naionalist wikipedia and obvioiusly intending to denigrate the contributuions of a Jew. --Lacatosias 10:47, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

text: BTW, I've now integrated the (verifiable) references I wanted to have from the WNWiki page into the text. No more need for the quote; we can go on discussing the link. --Alvestrand 09:51, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have linked the CRS article on the WN Wiki (which has GNU FDL), as it contains the references you are using and because it is certainly relevant to the discussion.De kludde 10:16, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In fact, do you want to know the truth? The addition of the (now two) links to the White Nationalist Wikipedia will almost certainly have on the general reader the effect it is beginning to have on me: I can no longer take seriosuly the substantive and responsible criticims and scholarly discussions of these "disputes" because the first thing that pops immediately into my mind is "they must be racist and anti-Semitic, hateful, revenge-seeking white supremacists." Sorry, I can't help it, but that is the unintended effect that your insistence on including such nonsense in the article is having on my view of the whole thing. You are discrediting the work of Hilbert, Poincaré, Lorentz and all of the serious scholars involved in this debate, sir. Perhaps this is what you really intended all along??--Lacatosias 11:27, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The fact (which you mention above) that you are not qualified in this area of course explains why it is of such importance to you that the article I was linking is from a White Nationalist website. This is perfectly understandable. For instance, I am not familiar with THC biochemistry but tend to disregard most claims that THC is harmless or may even be beneficial. I do this because I am familiar with the political views of those pushing for THC liberalization, and think they are up to no good. But I understand that this way of forming your opinion, while often being a good rule of the thumb, is prone to error. In the majority of cases we just have no other choice, because we have in-depth-familiarity only with a limited number of subjects. But for the Hilbert/Einstein debate I think I have at least some of the prerequisites to form an educated opinion about the issue.De kludde 13:55, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I think you miss his point. He's saying that instead of it being a problem of POV because the "White Nationalist" point of view is over-emphasized, it makes it POV the other direction because most sane people know that anything associated with Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and White Supremacists is probably a complete crock of lies. Now, you can say that you think that's wrong all along (as an active contributor to something which seeks to remove "Jewish influence" from Wikipedia, I can imagine your take on it), but that doesn't change the fact that most people are not very cool with anti-Semitism and White Supremacy (it is a descriptive, not a prescriptive statement). --Fastfission 21:11, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Lacotosias, no-one is proposing to systematically add links to that wiki from all physics articles, and I think we would all (except maybe de Kludde) strongly oppose anything like that.  I was just saying that it does seem relevant to me to describe in an article dealing with certain attacks on Einstein the frankly antisemitic motivation of at least some of those who have made such attacks in public.  IOW, while I certainly don't want to see references to church bombings in every article on churches in the WP, some articles do have a legitmate need to address head-on some very ugly topics.  Since those articles tend to raise passions which I prefer not to have to deal with, I do agree that we should keep reference to hate speech in the physics article space to an absolute minimum.  But it just does not seem possible to avoid this particular citation in this particular article, especially since the presence of here of User:De kludde this discussion as an author (?) of Einstein-related articles on the WN wiki seem to imply that while we did not go looking for hate speech trouble, such trouble came looking for us.  Does that make sense?---CH 02:41, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, no. I wasn't suggesting that it should either be removed or not removed. As Fastfission clarified, it was more of a descriptive statment than a prescptive statement. If anything, there may have been an implicit suggestion to De Kludee that, if he really thinks he can successfully contaminate this artcile with such nonsense by citing it, he should probably think again. The content is not very subtle and his the strategy is bound to be counterproductive for him. I also suggested that it detracts from serious dicussion of this material and I think that should be obvious from what has happned on the talk pages. But not suggesting cleaning up all refrences to anti-semtimism or denial of the existence of anti-semiticism. If DK insists on introducign anti-semitic material as relevant, then it will probably be interpreted as relevent to the existence of anti-semtism in these "disputes". Unfortunately, this may detract from the work of non-antisemiic scholars who are intersted in the facts. --Lacatosias 09:45, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I think that last bit is a good thing to note. Nobody had made any insinuations about alterior motives about editors here until they were stated explicitly! If you come here citing your great work at an explicitly anti-Semitic website, don't be surprised if someone suggests you might be an anti-Semite. --Fastfission 03:24, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: White Nationalist Wiki account