JF Ptak Science Books   1310

I really don’t want to make a post here on the pre-history of the special relativity theory (SR)—I really just want to post the English translation of a paper that came late in the career of the polymathic Henri Poincare (1854-1911) and in the same year as Einstein’s epochal paper (1905). It appeared in the quirky/odd and cellularly-strange journal called The Monist in January 1905, and is remarkable for its brevity (only 24 pages), accessibility (plainly and simply written, and without a single footnote) and vastly sweeping ideas.  It is so nearly powerful that there are many who claim that Poincare preceded Einstein’s relativity paper in it–they are a strict minority, and I ,ust say that I’m not one of them. (Poincare would republish this paper in a more technical form in 1906 as  “Sur la dynamique de l’electron”, published in the Comptes Rendus volume 140–both can be found in the 1905 entry in Lecat’s Bibliographie de la Relativite # 2269, the second paper of which can be found in a fine translation here by an old friend of our store, Scott Walter.  ( I should also say that you may buy the rare original offprint of this paper at our blog bookstore, here.)

I’ve made two word clouds of the 1920 EInstein relativity book posed against the Poincare 1905 paper, here.

(This photo shows Poincare seated next to Mme Curie at the first Solvay Conference in 1911.)   

It has been resident here on the computer for a long time and thought to publish it here.  This is not by any means the only effort by Poincare in this area—in addition to technical papers Poincare had earlier published his “Science and Hypothesis” in 1902 which included some basic philosophical investigations on the relativity of space and time, the questioning of the existence of the aether, and some other pertinent SR-related topics—again, addressed to an advanced general audience. 
There were of course many others who made important contributions to to development of SR:  Joseph Larmor, Wilhelm Wien, Heinrich Hertz, HA Lorentz, W. Voigt, Michelson Morely, Walter Kaufman, Max Abraham, GF FitzGerlad, Herman Minkowski, and many others.  (A nice place to start on the history of this topic is  The Genesis of General Relativity Vol. 3: Theories of Gravitation in the Twilight of Classical Physics; Part I (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 250), 253-271, Springer, 2007.

Although a strong case can be made for Poincare being one of the last of a breed that “knew everything”(like Arnold Sommerfeld, Herman von Helmholtz, JC Maxwell, Goethe, and so on) he really didn’t get to SR before Einstein, in my opinion.  At the very least it was Einstein who correctly reinterpreted Lorentzian electrodynamics and finally did away with the ether, not Poincare.

Also see a fine physics blog dealing with Poincare here.

And so the paper:

THE PRINCIPLES OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS.
by Henri Poincare

Reprinted from The Monist, volume 15, Number 1, 1905.

WHAT is the actual state of mathematical physics? What are the problems it is led to set itself? What is its future? Is its orientation on the point of modifying itself ? Will the aim and the methods of this science appear in ten years to our immediate successors in the same light as to ourselves; or, on the contrary, are we about to witness a profound transformation? Such are the questions we are forced to raise in entering today upon our investigation.

If it is easy to propound them, to answer is difficult.