Re: Poincaré's 1900 paper on Lorentz

On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:53:40 +0000, Androcles wrote:

"sal" <pragmatist@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:47b50a2c$0$29797$ec3e2dad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

| This is a moderately interesting paper which occasionally comes up
| in discussions of the history of relativity. In case anyone's
| interested in reading it, doesn't read French, and can't find an
| English translation, I've put one here:
|
| http://www.physicsinsights.org/poincare-1900.pdf
|
| It's linked to from the misc section of the website, FWIW.
|
| If anyone spots any klunkers in the translation, let me know and
| I'll correct it. (Errors in the the content of the paper itself
| are, of course, not going to get fixed at this late date.)
|

Why would a pissing contest between Poincare and Lorentz be a
klunker in the history of bull***?

I see my killfile entry for you expired again. OTOH, as usual you're
one of the folks I can count on to read what I post, so what the hey.

You apparently didn't look at Poincaré's paper before replying.
Poincaré thinks Lorentz is the cat's pajamas; there's no pissing
contest here. It's actually more of a pean to Lorentz.

This paper is occasionally cited as containing most of the content of
Einstein's 1905 electrodynamics paper, which, it is sometimes claimed,
he plagiarized from Poincaré. The remainder of the content of
Einstein:1905 (so goes the story) was lifted from a later paper from
Poincaré -- 1904 or early 1905, not sure of the date of that one, and
I haven't read it.

The occasionally so-called "e-sync" method for synchronizing clocks is
mentioned briefly in Poincaré 1900, and he says a lot about radiation
pressure. Outside of that ... well, you can judge for yourself. Or
not; up to you. 108 year old physics papers are, to say the least,
"of historical interest only".



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