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Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?
- bamin 7y agoHilbert was first to think it, Einstein was first to publish it
- laronian 7y agoActually, seems Hilbert pushed Einstein to think and publish it first
- pvg 7y agoA bit of a nit but the section on 'Timeline of relativity theory' should probably start with Galileo - this is still reflected in terminology like 'Galilean principle of relativity', 'Galilean transformation', 'Galilean invariance' etc
- Iv 7y agoI find it uncanny how a "who got it first?" become a salient question today whereas as the time it was obvious both were excited at collaborating to make a theory that works well. Really makes you wonder what would research would like without the race for publication. What I was taught about this "rivalry" is that Einstein struggled with some parts of the theory and Hilbert proposed some complicated mathematical tools that Einstein at first felt should not be necessary but ended up using after a few months of frustration.
- empath75 7y agoI have gotten the impression that Einstein learned the math that he needed to, when he needed to learn it, and that he had hoped to avoid learning the sort of math that Hilbert was already somewhat comfortable with.
- devnulloverflow 7y agoAbsolutely. Einstein is a bit famous for punching well above his weight compared to his own mathematical background. Most of his great work involves beautiful arguments that requiring only maths that a good-but-not-genius high school student could understand. The GR paper is a bit disappointing in comparison, because after setting out as much as he can of the physics, he just dives into big equations one after another. That probably roughly follows his own trajectory: first he had some intuition for how space-time curvature could cause some gravity-like effects. But to nail it down he just had to buckle-up and learn the mathematics of non-euclidean geometry. The nice thing about the paper is that it was one of the first applications of such mathematics to physics, so Einstein takes the time to explain it (which also blows out the equation count).
- yig 7y agoCan you please post a link to the paper?
- arunix 7y agoSee https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/ https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/ Doc. 21 On the General Theory of Relativity https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/110 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/110 Doc. 22 On the General Theory of Relativity (Addendum) https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/120 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/120 Doc. 24 Explanation of the Perihelion Motion of Mercury from the General Theory of Relativity https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/124 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/124 Doc. 25 The Field Equations of Gravitation https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/129 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/129
- dlkf 7y ago"Who got it first?" has always been a salient question. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calcu...
- BlackFly 7y agoI thought Marcel Grossmann was usually credited with helping Einstein with the tensor approach to General Relativity. All of this was more salient at the time, which the article points out: Hilbert carried a grudge against Einstein for a period of time. Lorentz was bitter about Einstein getting credit for special relativity to the end of his days, and Einstein denied ever having read Lorentz's or Poincare's papers even long after he had moved to the Institute for Advanced Studies. The bitterness and personal politics involved have faded. It is now interesting just from an academic (historical) standpoint. A lot of quantum field theorist refer to "Einstein summation convention" which is a special case of Ricci calculus and is a notation that was developed together with Levi-Civita by Ricci in their contributions to the field of relativity. At least most quantum field theorist know about Levi-Civita through the Levi-Civita tensor. Given the controversy described in this article one wonders why they are called the Einstein equations and the Hilbert-Einstein action when Einstein indusputably had nothing to do with the derivation of the action principle but Hilbert disputably is responsible for the derivation of the field equations. At the very least people talk about the Lorentz transformation and the Poincare group. Since general relativity was essentially a unification of the spacetime defined by Maxwell's equations (special relativity) and gravitation, the quest to fully unify the theories that began with Lorentz and Poincare pointing out the strange transformation properties of electric matter continued. A lot of people are aware of Einstein's continued search for a Grand Unified Theory. But in general people are less aware of what theories he introduced (teleparallel gravity for example) or that other people were all trying (Kaluza and Klein for example) and continue to try to this day. In the case of things like dark matter, there might be some hope of measuring the Kaluza-Klein scalar fields or maybe we genuinely need a completely different theory. The history is more interesting because of the missteps, mistakes and politics along the way. It helps us understand the missteps, mistakes and politics of science that are still happening today.
- soVeryTired 7y agoStigler's law of eponomy says that no scientific law is named after its discoverer [0]. What you're describing is far more common than you might think! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
- hermitdev 7y agoDoes it matter? I think this misses the forest for the trees. Yeah, we can focus on the first to discover something, but awards and acknowledgments are often on first to publish, e.g. Make it public. After all, what does your grand descovery matter if you're the only one that knows about it and someone working in parallel finds it also and publishes first? And how does the scientific community verify the veracity of discovering first if you didnt publish first? Hilbert might have know about it first, but what does it matter to the world writ large if he didnt publish? Einstein published, and thus the world knows and he is thus recognized for that.
- onion2k 7y agoDoes it matter? If we want an accurate historical record of human achievement, yes. That's separate to the end result. If you're focused on the theory and nothing else, then it doesn't really matter that Einstein wrote it either. We could remove the attribution entirely and the theory would still exist. Hilbert might have know about it first, but what does it matter to the world writ large if he didnt publish? Einstein published, and thus the world knows and he is thus recognized for that. That depends on why Hilbert didn't publish first. There are plenty of examples of people from minorities (women and PoC especially) discovering theorems but the scientific community ignoring them, and then a rich white man publishing the same theory to great acclaim. And then, even hundreds of years later, governments failing to fund the education of those minorities on the basis that they're genetically inferior because no one from those minorities has published anything of note. Correctly attributing discoveries to the right people does make a difference in the wider context of society.
- lr4444lr 7y agoThere are plenty of examples of people from minorities (women and PoC especially) discovering theorems but the scientific community ignoring them Can you provide 2 or 3 examples of that? I know there are STEM contributions on the engineering side - patents, work at NASA - that often go unmentioned, but I've never heard of solid evidence that actual provable research was ignored.
- gumby 7y agoThis reminds me of Wallace pushing Darwin to publish first.
- sysbin 7y agoEinstein was a pacifist and agreed with Spinoza's philosophy. I speculate Einstein just wanted things published the earliest in any case and for the next problems to be focused on.
- BlackFly 7y agoThe history misses several salient steps, like Lorentz and Poincare describing special relativity before 1905. I guess if you want to describe the controversy of general relativity you might not want to get distracted by the controversy over special relativity... but a pattern starts to emerge. Then the history leaves out Nordstrom's contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going to state that "It is indisputable that Hilbert, like all of his other colleagues, acknowledged Einstein as the sole creator of relativity theory," it seems Hilbert was simply willing to drop it. Almost all practitioners I am aware of are at the very least aware of the contributions of Marcel Grossman even if nobody knows about Nordstrom and others. It is a huge overstatement to say that Einstein was the sole creator. Reading about the history of Nordstrom's theory of gravity is far more illuminating on the actual active research attempting to find a relativistic theory of gravity. In fact a student of Lorentz, Fokker, working with Einstein was able to show that Nordstrom's theory was equivalent to an expression involving the ricci scalar and a trace of the stress energy tensor. Unlike Einstein's proposal around this time, it was diffeomorphism invariant. It is likely this development, by Fokker, lead Einstein to propose the R_ij = 8\pi T_ij formulation he was pushing before the controversial period with Hilbert. Why might this be important? Well people have a tendency to be interested in history. The extended history involving Hilbert, Nordstrom, Grossman and more is important because it is more illuminating to the reality of how physical theories are actually developed. It turns out that maybe Einstein doesn't deserve the level of hero worship he gets, which certain types of people may find invigorating. Also, this episode shows that petty squabbles and politics exist in "modern" science.
- avip 7y agoIIRC from the book Chaos it was often referred to as Poincaré’s relativity theory in France.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- arugulum 7y agoI would love to read a deep dive into the history of (semi) modern science. In particular, one that would avoid pop-science analogies and that is unafraid of technical detail. Ideally one that is more focused on the intricacies and lineage of research than the particulars of researchers' personal lives. I feel that academics often have significant insight into the history of their own fields and personalities therein, but that knowledge is rarely condensed/disseminated. Perhaps it's because matters can get quite political and subjective at that level.
- j7ake 7y agoIt’s clear that it’s not who did the math first that gets recognition, but the person who makes the scientific leap to connect math to new ideas of how the world works. Lorentz and Poincaré both had mathematical formulations that were the same as Einstein’s special relativity, but Einstein was the one who gets credit for connecting them to what we now call special relativity.
- BlackFly 7y agoThis narrative is very unpersuasive, since the actual mechanics that are used to perform calculations in special relativity and the idea that they should apply to all matter were developed by Lorentz and Poincare starting in the 1890s. The moving clock idea was also introduced by them before Einstein in 1900 and 1904. The most persuasive narrative to me for why Einstein is credited is because he moved to the USA at the right time and introduced these ideas to American scientists at the time when the USA was starting to become more scientifically prominent than Europe. Of course they would associate those ideas with Einstein and credit him, he would be the citation they would know about and wouldn't have any reason to cite further work since his citations are self contained enough for their purposes. It isn't nefarious, it isn't meritocratic: it is just pragmatic.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoI don't buy that narrative. I think that Einstein's special relativity paper showed how the mathematics followed from first principles. Neither Lorentz nor Poincare did that. They may have had the mathematics that worked, they may have had it first. But Einstein told us why.
- BlackFly 7y agoWhich first principle exactly? Because they were already stating that the speed of light would be constant in all frames which is the only thing necessary to derive special relativity. Lorentz derived the transformations precisely to describe this fact! Certainly not the lack of the aether; while it isn't necessary to describe relativity it isn't precluded either and cosmic time is a thing today. The spacetime we live in is a thing describable in its own right, on large scales it has a preferred time direction. He was responsible for spreading those ideas, but he certainly wasn't the first one to express them. It is still respectful to give him credit for the spread of these ideas, but we don't need to pretend like Lorentz and Poincare were blind men fumbling around in the dark until he came along in order to justify our reverence.
- User23 7y agoNo mention of Hermann Minkowski[1]? As any educated mathematician knows, it was Gauss's student Riemann who solved the maths for n-dimensional manifolds, but it was Minkowski who developed modern spacetime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski
- debatem1 7y agoMinkowski blew my mind when I fist started to understand his work. Without a doubt the most useful pieces of math I learned after multiplication, and more intuitive even than that.
- gjm11 7y agoWhat work in particular? Minkowski did a lot of neat things. (But I'm not sure I'd describe any of the ones I know of as more intuitive than multiplication.)
- debatem1 7y agoHis work on the geometry of numbers. It was like a secret decoder ring for the language of higher math at the time, while being both elegant and tangible. Compare to multiplication, which occasionally still bears strangely shaped fruit for me even today.
- Sharlin 7y ago> 2. The precession (change in orientation) of the perihelion (closest point of a planet to its star) of Mercury coming out to 18 inches rather than the observed 45 inches per century; Certainly 45” is arcseconds here, not inches!
- evanb 7y agoYes. 45 inches per century would not have been remotely measurable at the time, and may not even be measurable today!
- known 7y agoSounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman versus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Hamilton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Hamilton
- gjm11 7y agoIt doesn't seem much like it to me. Hamilton/Perelman: Hamilton does X. Perelman builds on it to do Y, which solves an important problem. Perelman gets most of the credit and complains that Hamilton ought to get more. I see two ways to try to map Einstein/Hilbert onto this but neither of them works well. Einstein/Hilbert #1 (X = differential geometry): Other mathematicians do X. Einstein and Hilbert build on it to get Y, which solves an important problem. Maybe Hilbert gets to Y slightly earlier or slightly later. Einstein gets most of the credit. Hilbert is slightly annoyed. Einstein/Hilbert #2 (X = early work on general relativity): Einstein does X. Einstein and Hilbert build on it to get Y, which solves an important problem. Maybe Hilbert gets there slightly earlier or slightly later. Einstein gets most of the credit. Hilbert is slightly annoyed. If you see this as "Einstein, then Hilbert" then the analogy doesn't work because Einstein (earlier) is the one who gets the credit. If you see it as "Hilbert, then Einstein" then it doesn't work because Einstein (later) isn't building on a substantial foundation built by Hilbert (earlier) without Einstein; the foundation is Einstein's for sure, and if Hilbert has priority it's the last step that he got to before Einstein. And in either case it doesn't work because the one who gets the credit is happy to keep it whereas Perelman was really cross that people didn't see how much was due to Hamilton.
- peignoir 7y agoReminds me of Newton, Hooke and Hailey arguments (c.f https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_motu_corporum_in_gyrum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_motu_corporum_in_gyrum) It has been common to see such debates but at the end having advanced science is the main goal and these fights while fascinating are anecdotal. I always wonder if one could rewrite math and physics without the use of names to describe a theory or a théorème but rather use a descriptive one. General relativity is indeed well named instead of Einstein relativity, Pythagorean’s theorem could become the rectangle triangle theorem ...
- mhh__ 7y agoIt is referred to as Einstein gravity by some.
- GuB-42 7y agoKind of pointless question. Einstein clearly is the "boss" of general relativity. He got the idea, worked on it, applied the maths, etc... So let him have his name. But he wasn't alone. It is not possible to talk about general relativity without mentioning a dozen of brilliant minds that either helped him along the way or served as a foundation. A part that I think is often forgotten is about the guys who made observations, the engineers and craftsmen who built the instruments, and the experimentalists who interpreted the results. General relativity did one thing: solve the inconsistency regarding the orbit of Mercury. And without accurate measurement, that inconsistency would have been within the error margin, making general relativity nothing more than wankery.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoThat might depend on who's frame of reference we took, Einstein, or Hilbert's? Are either of them on a train at any point?
- spodek 7y agoMaybe off-topic, but with the dates and places, it's hard not to think of this furiously paced physics and math work happening in the midst of World War 1, and not that far from it. I wonder how the context affected their work. I would love for a physicist, a mathematician, a historian of science, and Dan Carlin to do a Hardcore History on this period.
- Ceezy 7y agoNot Einstein, he never was a mathematician. He got helped most of the time to do the math(as he should)
- soalindia 7y agohhh
- soalindia 7y agobbbb