JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 254

Okay, okay–this is definitely apples and oranges here, but it is interesting nevertheless, even if I can’t reference the apple and the orange to something that would make sense for both, for something that has shared grounds of commonality.   What we have here is the Wordle version of Henri Poincare’s The Principles of Mathematical Physics (1905,and which I wrote about a little here accompanied by the paper’s full text), which was his quai-popular attempt at explaining a modified version of what some people call his “relativity” paper of 1904 (On the Dynamics of the Electron, which appeared in the Comptes rednus):

View this (“contrast” being too hard, too unwieldy, too problematic) along with Einstein’s 1920 Relativity:  the Special and theGeneral Theory, the book in which he makes a full frontal assault of a popular explanation of his special (1905) and general 1915/16) theories of relativity:

Very little in common, no?  It really is just an interesting set of images, really; I’d hate to think of this as anything approaching content analysis or anything besides this that might look like a “serious” attempt at comparing the two.  I think of them in very simple terms, these two Wordscapes–like looking at two rivers, the one meanderingly serene, while the other looks more contentious, robust, challenging.  At the end of it all the robust Einstein river, unlike the beautiful if not sanguine Poincare river, rushes towards a Niagra; the Poincare, not.