
Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert? - laronian
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/einstein-and-hilberts-race-to-generalize-relativity-6885f44e3cbe
======
BlackFly
The 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.

~~~
arugulum
I 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.

~~~
cambalache
In physics there is a rich literature documenting its history. And as you
mentioned, it is scattered around books, periodicals and scientific journals.
A very small selection for you and any people interested:

From Emilio Segre (Nobel Laureate) there is this 2 book series.Recommended. \-
From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves [1] \- From X-rays to Quarks [2]

Then, you have Abraham Pais, all his books are highly recommended, I will
include 2 here

[3] Subtle is the lord (Best Einstein Scientific Biography) [4] Inward Bound
(Superb Scientific history of XX century physics)

Jagdish Mehra wrote a gargantuan history of Quantum Mechanics in six volumes.
He studied and /or interviewed most of the big hitters who developed the
theory. The science content is high so you need a good foundation.

[5] The Historical Development of Quantum Theory

Richard Westfall wrote the best Newton biography that I know.

[6] Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton

Finally the issue number 2 of the 72nd volume of Review of Modern Physics [7]
is a gem; packed with historical reviews of the development of all fields in
physics during the 20th century, written by eminent people.

Of course this is just a minuscule sample of an extraordinary bibliography.
Sadly life is so short to make it justice.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486458083](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486458083)
[2]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486457834](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486457834)
[3]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/019853907X](https://www.amazon.com/dp/019853907X)
[4]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198519974](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198519974)
[5][https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Development-Quantum-
Theory...](https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Development-Quantum-
Theory-1-6/dp/0387952624/) [6]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521274354](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521274354)
[7]
[https://journals.aps.org/rmp/issues/71/2](https://journals.aps.org/rmp/issues/71/2)

~~~
eyeundersand
Thanks for the recommendations! Found a couple of books I'd like to purchase,
read the first twenty or so pages at one go, then relegate it to the pile
along with the 50 others that have been replaced by new ones.

------
Iv
I 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.

~~~
BlackFly
I 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
Stigler'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)

~~~
avip
Great, new member in the elite club of _rules that make their own exception_

~~~
DomreiRoam
I don't think it's the case here: "Stigler himself named the sociologist
Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law" to show that it follows
its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.",
from the wikipedia article.

------
GuB-42
Kind 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.

------
User23
No 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
Minkowski 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
What 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
His 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.

------
hermitdev
Does 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
_Does 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
_There 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.

~~~
onion2k
Esther Lederberg - discovered lambda phage in bacteria but the Nobel Prize for
Medicine for the discovery went to her husband.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell - discovered pulsars and went on to work with her thesis
advisor Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. They got the Nobel Prize for Physics
and she didn't.

Ada Lovelace - invented computer programming but the credit went to Charles
Babbage because he invented the hardware (one of the more well known examples;
she gets some credit these days).

Rosalind Franklin - discovered the double helix structure of DNA using x-rays.
Her theory was denounced by Watson and Crick who believed it was a single
helix. They went on to win a Nobel Prize when they changed their minds and
said it was actually a double helix after all.

Lise Meitner - discovered nuclear fission but the credit and Nobel Prize went
to her lab partner Otto Hahn.

~~~
bobcostas55
>Rosalind Franklin - discovered the double helix structure of DNA using
x-rays.

This is a gross mischaracterization. Fraklin certainly took some pictures of
DNA using x-ray crystallography, but she absolutely did not figure out the
structure.

~~~
sannee
Yeah - and if you believe Watsons autobiography, she was strongly opposed to
the idea that DNA had a helical structure until Watson and Crick basically
figured it out and presented her with some very convincing arguments.

Franklins contributions seem pretty overstated compared to how people don't
mention all the other people involved that had some critical insight.

------
peignoir
Reminds 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__
It is referred to as Einstein gravity by some.

------
Sharlin
_> 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
Yes. 45 inches per century would not have been remotely measurable at the
time, and may not even be measurable today!

------
known
Sounds 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
It 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.

------
spodek
Maybe 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.

------
pvg
A 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

------
inflatableDodo
That might depend on who's frame of reference we took, Einstein, or Hilbert's?
Are either of them on a train at any point?

------
Ceezy
Not Einstein, he never was a mathematician. He got helped most of the time to
do the math(as he should)

------
j7ake
It’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
This 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
I 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
Which 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.

------
bamin
Hilbert was first to think it, Einstein was first to publish it

~~~
laronian
Actually, seems Hilbert pushed Einstein to think and publish it first

------
gumby
This reminds me of Wallace pushing Darwin to publish first.

------
sysbin
Einstein 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.

