E. O. Wilson is quoted in a New Yorker article as saying that a lot of physicists got together and wrote an angry letter with hundreds of signatures criticizing Einstein’s paper on Special Relativity when it first came out. He’s saying this by way of defending himself in light of the fact that a bunch of biologists just got together and did the same regarding his latest article in Nature.
But is it true that there was such protest concerning SR? If so, where can I find out more about it? If not, was Wilson just making it up out of whole cloth or is there something that did happen that he is mischaracterizing?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. Special relativity triggered a lot of controversy at the time. If nothing else, the German Physics group probably wrote some letters condemning it, it’s safe to say.
Well my googling’s coming up blank. There’s plenty of detail about the reception to the electrodynamics of moving bodies, but surprisingly little mention of any controversy.
I guess because the theory was not entirely novel, but built on a few theories that had already been gaining traction.
I’ve never heard of it, and can’t seem to turn up any evidence that it happened. I suspect he made it up. There was a lot of back and forth among the more famous physicists at the time as the theory was put under scrutiny, but it was hardly all that controversial given the previous work of Lorentz and Poincare, and already by 1906 Einstein had quite a few defenders, some of the more prominent being Planck, Born, Von Laue, Langevin.
Yea, does seem kind of low-class to compare yourself to Einstein and your detractors to Nazi’s. But I guess Wilson may have just heard of the name of the pamphlet at some point and not realized its origin.
IIRC, Einstein’s response to that was something along the lines of: “Why one hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”, though this is from memory and may be apocryphal.
Does anyone have a first-hand source for the quotation “It does not take 100 scientists to prove me wrong, just one fact”? Not a second-hand source, a first-hand one. Either the exact place in one of his writings where this appeared, or a direct statement in print from someone who heard it said directly.
I remember reading something a while back about how during WWII the Nazis attacked Einstein and his theories as “jewish science” or “jewish lies” (or jewish something) and Goebbels had a bunch of German scientists sign a statement in opposition to Einstein, claiming his theories were wrong.