Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:22, 20 September 2009

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Hello, Flegelpuss, and welcome to Misplaced Pages! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Misplaced Pages:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! South Bay (talk) 01:34, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Poincaré or Einstein?

Misplaced Pages is not the right place for rewriting history. Most historians say that Einstein and not Poincaré developed SR. See the discussion here: Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Physics#Poincare better than Einstein edits by Schlafly?.....--D.H (talk) 15:20, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

You recently said the following: "I think we both agree that Poincaré invented at least 90% of special relativity before Einstein. (light synchronisation, relativity principle, philosophical relativity of time, etc.). Well, this is also the opinion of most (not all) historians of science." Why are you contradicting yourself here? Please quit mass-undoing my painstaking factual corrections and removal of POV language. (BTW, I'd include Lorentz and others in that 90% along with Poincaré, albeit it can't be called "relativity" theory until Poincaré). Flegelpuss (talk) 15:58, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but Poincaré stopped shortly before inventing the complete theory. He remained the notion of a stationary aether, distinguished between true and local time etc. BTW: My or your opinion is totally irrelevant. Misplaced Pages has to avoid original research and must rely on secondary sources. And your edits are in contradiction of the overwhelming majority of those sources. So please stop. (See Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Physics#Poincaré-POV-pushing.) --D.H (talk) 15:51, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

The notion of "complete theory" is arbitrary. Einstein's version is experimentally indistinguishable from Poincare's and Lorentz's, it just appears to use fewer axioms. The "ether" part is no more important than different quantum mechanical interpretations. If Many Worlds became the dominant paradigm, Heisenberg and Schroedinger would be still be considered the main discoverers of QM (of course that leaves out many important predecessors and successors there too). You haven't cited any sources that factually contradict any of my edits. Some of them are obvious POV edits, others are factual disputes. Your mass-undoing shows that you haven't carefully thought about them as I have. Please stop the mass-undos. If you have good justification for undoing any _particular_ careful edit I have made, that is fair game, but you're out of bounds with the mass-undos. Flegelpuss (talk) 15:58, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

BTW by "obvious POV edits", I mean taking out obviously subjective POV nonsense, like calling Einstein's version of the theory (as opposed to his predecessors that invented "90%" of SR, or successors like Minkowski) "radical", "fundamental", and other such nonsense-phrases that have no places in neutral POV articles. Flegelpuss (talk) 16:04, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Maybe the day will come, when it is accepted by most historians that there is no essential/radical difference between the Poincaré-Lorentz ether theory and special relativity. But for now, this is not the case and therefore we cannot present this view in Misplaced Pages. You asked me for references - the articles contain a lot of them (Pais, Holton, Miller, Galison, etc.), read them. BTW: It was you who started with mass edits without using references - I've provided a lot of them. (The only undisputed thing you contributed was the fact, that in Einstein's time the atom concept was widely used, this is in fact correct). BTW: The articles already present the brilliant contributions of Poincaré to relativity - I can remember the time when Poincaré's contributions were not even mentioned. --D.H (talk) 16:22, 20 September 2009 (UTC)