Greater than the sum of its parts

Ini pandangan balas posting di bawah. [n3 Julai 6 2011]

I AM not a physicist and I don’t know very much more about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity than the next person. My response to the article “Decolonisation of universities begins with us” was made owing to what I felt was undue disparaging of Einstein just because someone else had made a correction to one of his equations.
Prof C.K. Raju has now said (July 6) that Einstein’s vilification is justified because the latter is suspected to have “copied the entire Theory of Relativity from Poincaré”.
Prof Raju’s erudite analysis of the works of Einstein and Poincaré that led him to this conclusion are best left to discussion among experts. Here, I would just like to share a few common sense thoughts.
Plagiarism in scientific research does happen. For example, someone could rehash a long forgotten report in an obscure research discipline, and have it published in one of the less read journals. However, such shenanigans are difficult to pull off in a high profile area of research where each new discovery is minutely discussed, analysed and dissected by experts in the field.
If Einstein had essentially plagiarised the discoveries of Poincaré, this transgression would not have been lost on a host of expert physicists who had applauded Einstein for his discovery. As much as they were Einstein’s contemporaries, they were also Poincaré’s.
It would arguably have been easier for scientists of the day to be persuaded by the writings of someone of the stature of Poincaré, a distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, than Einstein, a Bern Patent Office technical expert, third class.
Indeed, if Poincaré had in fact anticipated Einstein’s findings on relativity, wouldn’t the community of physicists have hoisted Poincaré on their collective shoulders and declared him a genius, even before Einstein’s publication? Why did they hold back their praise until Einstein’s paper came along?
Rightly or wrongly, the scientific community at large were of the opinion that the body of work accomplished by Einstein represented an important advancement over existing knowledge at the time. How would such a turn of events square with Prof Raju’s contention that Poincaré had in fact articulated all the essential elements leading to the theory earlier?
I would hazard a guess that what Einstein offered to the scientific community in his Theory of Relativity was greater than the sum of its parts. Think of a jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces are already there to begin with, yet someone still has to put them all together to make sense of the final picture. Might Einstein have been that someone?


Researcher
Kuala Lumpur
 

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