What were Einstein's original ideas?

[Simplicio]

@septimus

I’ll probably write nothing here that hasn’t been said upthread, but these accusations against Einstein are a major peeve of mine. The accusations are so inexplicable, one suspects that anti-Semitism lies at their root.

Eh, I don’t think Einstein was a plagerist, but his priority in the case of Special Relativity is thin enough (and he does seem to have consciously under-stated how much of Poincare’s work he was familiar with when he published his theory) that I hardly think accusing him is “inexplicable” or require throwing around accusations of anti-semitism.

[septimus]

@Simplicio

Eh, I don’t think Einstein was a plagerist, but his priority in the case of Special Relativity is thin enough (and he does seem to have consciously under-stated how much of Poincare’s work he was familiar with when he published his theory) that I hardly think accusing him is “inexplicable” or require throwing around accusations of anti-semitism.

In OP we see

I’ve been having a debate with someone who calls Einstein a plagiarist and says he had no original ideas at all, just pinching them off others and passing them off as his own.

I don’t think there’s any serious dispute that General Relativity was almost solely Einstein’s creation, and was one of the most creative and profound theories ever. In my post above, I mention 3 other major achievements where Einstein was key. One can agree that some of his 1905 papers should have done a better job of citing earlier papers, and still find “he had no original ideas at all” to be inexplicable and wonder about what the motive is for such nonsensical comments.

[Andy_L]

@Dahu

I’ve been having a debate with someone who calls Einstein a plagiarist and says he had no original ideas at all, just pinching them off others and passing them off as his own.

A typical comment goes like this:

That seems to be the main Einstien working method. Start with the
conclusion (swiped from someone else, such as E=mc^2, Lorentz
transforamtions etc) and force a derivation. Make no references at all to
any previous workers. Claim it all as tour own (and, amazingly, get away
with it). Albert Einstein was a career plagiarist. This is well documented, despite the orchestrated, perpetual
sychophantic mega-hype.

I feel that he’s wrong, but I’m no scientist and can’t argue well against the stuff he comes out with.

He has challenged me to “name one of his good original ideas” that wasn’t swiped from someone else.

Can anyone help?

How is Einstein’s plagiarism supposed to have worked - he just copies from some of the most famous scientists of the day, and no one complains? That doesn’t sound like a rational evaluation of how human beings work (let alone how science works).

[Asympotically_fat]

I think it’s public misconception, it’s difficult to argue that Einstein deserved more primacy in the area of special relativty than any of Lorentz, Poincare and Minkowski. His biggest acheivements in this area were formulating in terms of two simple principles and deriving the mass-energy equivalence.

In some ways he was to special relatvity what von Neumann was to quantum mechanics.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Chronos

Actually, let me amend that a bit:

One, unlike any of those others, Einstein made significant contributions to many different topics.

I should give credit that Maxwell also made significant contributions to many different topics. He was nearly as great a physicist as Einstein was, and doesn’t get as much recognition as he deserves. It was just his bad luck that a mere half-century after his time, he got eclipsed by one of the two or three physicists in history who was even greater than he.

He still wouldn’t have ended up developing special relativity, though, since he died in 1879.

Maxwell, though, got the coolest…legacy?.. of all. Maxwell’s Demons! That is the best name to leave behind in the annals of science that I’ve ever heard.