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by dynamic_sausage
1347 days ago
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Annoying as it may be, this situation is somewhat ubiquitous in the history of human knowledge. Transistors were invented by Lilienfeld, yet everyone knows about the work of Bardeen et al. at Bell Labs. Einstein in relativity is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare, which is why his Nobel prize mentioned the photoelectric effect and not relativity. Simple formulas of scientific credit tend to stick better; the path of scientific progress is usually anything but. This is ok. The main thing is the knowledge itself, not who came up with it after all. And yet it is very frustrating! |
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That doesn’t add up because there was no Nobel prize at all for relativity to anyone. Searching online the consensus seems to be a mix of things:
* general confusion that his photoelectric Nobel was for relativity.
* the experimental proof of relativity came at a time when anti-semitism was on the rise and so there was enough of a fig leaf of “there’s disagreement / dispute of it being proven”.
* Einstein didn’t attend the ceremony because of a prescheduled lecture tour in Japan (But also possibly because of a fear for personal safety as his name was on a hit list by the perpetrators of a successful assassination). This made it seem like he snubbed the prize committee (which maybe he also did because he probably should have had 3 Nobels for all his contributions and felt like that prize wasn’t handed out on merit).
Certainly by 1945 special relativity was proven as otherwise there wouldn’t be an atomic bomb and yet still no Nobel for anyone.