Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist

Christopher Jon Bjerknes

2.44 · Rating details · 34 ratings · 3 reviews

The name "Einstein" evokes images of genius, but was Albert Einstein, in fact, a plagiarist, who copied the theories of Lorentz, Poincare, Gerber, and Hilbert? A scholarly documentation of Albert Einstein's plagiarism of the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist discloses Einstein's method for manipulating credit for the work of his contemporar ...more

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Hardcover, 408 pages

Published July 1st 2002 by Xtx

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Nov 23, 2009 Joe rated it really liked it

Hard to find book that tells us that almost everything Einstein came up with was already discovered. Einstein just put it all together.

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Jan 30, 2021 Varapanyo Bhikkhu marked it as to-read

Christopher Jon Bjerknes accuses Einstein of plagiarism. Bjerknes writes:

Many people knew that Einstein did not hold priority for much of what he wrote. He, himself, was keenly aware of it. It is not uncommon for grandiose myths to accrue to overly idealized popular figures, such as Albert Einstein. Theoretical Physics, as a field, was small, and not well known in the period from 1905-1919. Theoretical physicists were not well known, and, since those in the field knew that Einstein was a plagiar Christopher Jon Bjerknes accuses Einstein of plagiarism. Bjerknes writes:

Many people knew that Einstein did not hold priority for much of what he wrote. He, himself, was keenly aware of it. It is not uncommon for grandiose myths to accrue to overly idealized popular figures, such as Albert Einstein. Theoretical Physics, as a field, was small, and not well known in the period from 1905-1919. Theoretical physicists were not well known, and, since those in the field knew that Einstein was a plagiarist, they largely ignored him…

Einstein evinced a career-long pattern of publishing “novel” theories and formulae after others had already published similar words, then claimed priority for himself. He did it with E = mc². He did it with the so-called special theory of relativity and he did it with the general theory of relativity.[4]

While I don’t understand physics well enough to know if Bjerknes’s analysis is accurate, it is certain that many physicists had little regard for Einstein in his later years. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, visited the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in January 1935. In a letter to his brother Frank, Oppenheimer conveyed his reaction to the occupants of Fine Hall at Princeton: “Princeton is a madhouse: its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate & helpless desolation. Einstein is completely cuckoo…”[5]

Oppenheimer also said in private that Einstein had no understanding of or interest in modern physics, and that Einstein had been wasting his time trying to unify gravitation and electromagnetism.[6]

Physicist Freeman Dyson was a colleague of Einstein’s from 1948 to 1955 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Dyson had a strong desire to meet and know Einstein when he arrived at the Institute. However, after reading Einstein’s recent scientific papers, Dyson decided they were junk. Dyson spent the next seven years avoiding Einstein so that he would not have to tell Einstein his work was junk.[7]

Physicist David Bodanis writes about Einstein’s later years: “Einstein’s peers regarded him as a has-been. Even many of his closest friends no longer took his ideas seriously.[8]

https://inconvenienthistory.com/11/2/...
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May 29, 2020 Marla Silovitch added it

Einstein's theories were not like his predecessors, nor were they ever going to figure out what he did. Another conspiracy theory book by an author who only sets out to discredit anyone who is Jewish. I can't believe goodreads would stoop so low. ...more

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