[BenoitP]

Plagiarized is too strong of a word. Poincaré too based his work on Lorentz's. And both with Einstein he sort of derived E = m c * 2, independently and earlier. But Einstein's publication was more complete.

Science is not totally ordered, the same invention can occur at two different places from the same shoulders of the same giant. Science is just partially ordered.

[boringuser2]

The problem is when the "ordering" of science is horizontal.

I.e. Einstein reading their works and copying their conclusions.

This is highly likely to have happened, regardless of the "completeness" of one work or another.

The thing I like about this is that it levels celebrity (something man-made) with rationality.

Why not reduce Einstein's celebrity? It reflects reality more accurately to do so.

[evanb]

The paper where Einstein introduces special relativity is really explicit about just providing a new way to think, not new mathematics. It starts out with explaining that there are two explanations for the same electrodynamical physics depending on the velocity of the system, and that's really weird.

Einstein's special-relativity fame comes from saying: no, actually, that is expected and they're really one explanation if you think like this rather than like that, even if the math works out the same as Lorentz's.