WAS  EINSTEIN  AN  "EINSTEIN"?

                    By V.S. Herrell, B.S., M.E., Ch.D.


            The Establishment Myth of Albert Einstein's Genius

Albert Einstein is held up by the establishment as a rare genius who
drastically changed the field of theoretical physics.  As such, he is
made an idol to young people, and his very name has become synonymous
with genius.  The truth, however, is very different.  The reality is that
Einstein was no "rocket scientist" - he was a relatively ignorant person.
 He contributed nothing original to the field of physics or any other
science, but on the contrary he stole the ideas of other men, and the
establishment media made him a hero.

When we actually examine the life of Albert Einstein, we find that his
only brilliance lay in his ability to plagiarize and steal other people's
ideas, passing then off as his own.  Einstein's education, or lack
thereof, is an important part of this story.  The Encyclodedia Britannica
says of Einstein's early education that he "showed little scholastic
ability."  It also says that at age 15, "with poor grades in history,
geography and languages, he left school with no diploma."  Einstein
himself wrote in a school paper of his "lack of imagination and practcal
ability."  In 1895, Einstein failed a simple entrance exam to an
engineering school in Zurich.   This exam consisted mainly of
mathematical problems, and Einstein showed himself to be mathematically
inept in this exam.  He then entered a lesser school hoping to use it as
a stepping stone to the engineering school he could not get into, but
after graduating in 1900, he still could not get a position at the
engineering school.  Unable to go to the school as he had wanted, he got
a job (with the help of a friend) at the patent office in Bern.  He was
to be a technical expert third class, which meant that he was too
incompetent for a higher qualified position. 

Even after publishing his so-called groundbreaking papers of 1905 and
after working in the patent office for six years, he was only elevated to
a second class standing.  Remember, the work he was doing at the patent
office, for which he was only rated third class, was not quantum
mechanics or theoretical physics, but was reviewing technical documents
for patents of everyday things, yet he was barely qualified.

He would work at the patent office until 1909, all the while continuously
trying to get a position at a university, but without success.  All of
these facts are true, but now begins the myth.  Supposedly, while working
a full-time job, without the aid of university colleagues, a staff  of
graduate students, a laboratory, or any of the things normally associated
with an academic setting, Einstein, in his spare time wrote four
ground-breaking essays in the field of theoretical physics that were
published in 1905.  Many people have recognized the impossibility of such
a feat, including Einstein himself, and therefore Einstein has led people
to believe that many of these ideas came to him in his sleep, out of the
blue, because indeed that is the only logical explanation of how an
admittedly inept fellow could have written such documents at the age of
26, without any real education.  However, a simpler explanation exists:
Einstein stole the ideas and plagiarized the papers.

Therefore, we will look at each of these ideas and discover the sources
of them.  It should be remembered that these ideas were presented by
Einstein's worshippers as totally new and completely different, each of
which would change forever the landscape of science.  These four papers
dealt with the following ideas: 

(1)  The foundation of the photon theory of light; ( 2) The equivalence
of energy and mass;  (3) The explanation of Brownian motion in liquids;
(4)  The special theory of relativity.

Let us first look at the last of these theories: the theory of
relativity.  This is perhaps the most famous idea falsely attributed to
Einstein.  Specifically, this 1905 paper dealt with what Einstein called
the Special Theory of Relativity (the general theory would come in 1915).
This theory contradicted the traditional Newtonian mechanics and was
based upon 2 premises:  (1) in the absence of acceleration, the laws of
nature are the same for all observers; and (2) since the speed of light
is independent of the motion of its source, the time interval between two
events is longer for an observer in whose time frame of reference the
events occur in the same place.  This is basically the idea that time
passed more slowly as one's velocity approaches the speed of light,
relative to slower velocities where time would pass faster.

This theory has been validated by modern experiments and is the basis for
modern physics.  But these two premises are far from being originally
Einstein's.  First of all, the idea that the speed of light was a
constant and was independent of the motion of its source was not
Einstein's at all, but was proposed by the Scottish scientist, James
Maxwell.  Maxwell studied the phenomenon of light extensively and first
proposed that it was electromagnetic in nature.  He wrote an article to
this effect for the 1878 edition of the Encyclodepia Britannica.  His
ideas promoted much debate, and by 1887, as a result of his work and the
ensuing debate, the scientific community, particularly Hendrik Antoon
Lorentz (1853-1928), Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward
Williams Morley (1838-1923), reached the conclusion that the velocity of
light was independent of the velocity of the observer.  Thus, this piece
of the special theory of relativity was known 27 years before Einstein
wrote his paper.

This debate over the nature of light also led Michelson and Morley to
conduct an important experiment, the results of which could not be
explained by Newtonian mechanics.  They observed a phenomenon caused by
relativity, but they did not understand relativity.  They had attempted
to detect the motion of the earth through ether, which was a medium
thought to be necessary for the propagation of light.  In response to
this problem, in 1889, the Irish physicist George Francis Fitzgerald
(1851-1901), who had also first proposed a mechanism for producing radio
waves, wrote a paper which stated that the results of the
Michelson-Morley
experiment could be explained if "the length of material bodies changes,
according as they are moving through the ether or across it, by an amount
depending on the square of the ratio of their velocities to that of
light."  This is the theory of relativity, 13 years before Einstein's
paper.

Furthermore, in 1892, Lorentz, from the Netherlands, proposed the same
solution and began to greatly expand the idea.  All throughout the
1890's, both Lorentz and Fitzgerald worked on these ideas and wrote
articles strangely similar to Einstein's special theory detailing what is
now known as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.  In 1898, the Irishman
Joseph Larmor wrote down equations explaining the Lorentz-Fitzgerald
contraction and its relativistic consequences, seven years before
Einstein's paper.  By 1904, Lorentz transformations, the series of
equations explaining relativity, were published by Lorentz.  They
describe the increase of mass, the shortening of length, and the time
dilation of a body moving at speeds close to the velocity of light.  In
short, by 1904, everything in Einstein's paper regarding the special
theory of relativity had already been published.

The French mathematician and physicist Jules Henri Poincare (1854-1912)
had, in 1898, written a paper unifying many of these ideas.  He stated,
seven years before Einstein's paper, that:  "We have no direct intuition
about the equality of two time intervals.  The simultaneity of two events
or the order of their succession, as well as the equality of two time
intervals, must be defined in such a way that the statements of the
natural laws be as simple as possible."

Anyone who has read Einstein's 1905 paper will immediately recognize the
similarity.  Thus we see that the only thing original about the Einstein
paper was the term "special theory of relativity."  Everything else was
plagiarized.  Over the next few years, Poincare became one of the most
important lecturers and writers regarding relativity; but he never, in
any of his papers or speeches, mentioned Albert Einstein.  Thus, while
Poincare was busy bringing the rest of the academic world upo tp speed
regarding relativity, Einstein was still working in the patent office in
Bern, and no one in the academic community thought it necessary to give
much credence or mention to Einstein's work.  Most of those early
physicists knew he was a fraud.

This brings us to the explanation of Brownian motion, the subject of
another of Einstein's 1905 papers.  Brownian motion describes the
irregular movement of a very small body (such as a grain of pollen
suspended in water) arising from the thermal energy of the molecules of
the fluid in which the body is immersed.  The movement had first been
observed by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown in 1827.  The explanation
of this phenomenon has to do with the kinetic theory of matter, and it
was the American Josiah Gibbs and the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann who first
explained this occurence, not Albert Einstein.  In fact, the mathematical
equation describing the motion contains the famous Boltzmann constant, k.
 Between these two men, they had explained by the 1890's everything in
Einstein's 1905 paper regarding Brownian motion.

End of Part 1.
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