<story><title>Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?</title><url>https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/einstein-and-hilberts-race-to-generalize-relativity-6885f44e3cbe</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BlackFly</author><text>The history misses several salient steps, like Lorentz and Poincare describing special relativity before 1905. I guess if you want to describe the controversy of general relativity you might not want to get distracted by the controversy over special relativity... but a pattern starts to emerge.&lt;p&gt;Then the history leaves out Nordstrom&amp;#x27;s contributions to the theory of gravity which are really important if you are going to state that &amp;quot;It is indisputable that Hilbert, like all of his other colleagues, acknowledged Einstein as the sole creator of relativity theory,&amp;quot; it seems Hilbert was simply willing to drop it. Almost all practitioners I am aware of are at the very least aware of the contributions of Marcel Grossman even if nobody knows about Nordstrom and others. It is a huge overstatement to say that Einstein was the sole creator.&lt;p&gt;Reading about the history of Nordstrom&amp;#x27;s theory of gravity is far more illuminating on the actual active research attempting to find a relativistic theory of gravity. In fact a student of Lorentz, Fokker, working with Einstein was able to show that Nordstrom&amp;#x27;s theory was equivalent to an expression involving the ricci scalar and a trace of the stress energy tensor. Unlike Einstein&amp;#x27;s proposal around this time, it was diffeomorphism invariant. It is likely this development, by Fokker, lead Einstein to propose the R_ij = 8\pi T_ij formulation he was pushing before the controversial period with Hilbert.&lt;p&gt;Why might this be important? Well people have a tendency to be interested in history. The extended history involving Hilbert, Nordstrom, Grossman and more is important because it is more illuminating to the reality of how physical theories are actually developed. It turns out that maybe Einstein doesn&amp;#x27;t deserve the level of hero worship he gets, which certain types of people may find invigorating. Also, this episode shows that petty squabbles and politics exist in &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; science.</text></comment>
<story><title>Who Did the Math for General Relativity First, Einstein or Hilbert?</title><url>https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/einstein-and-hilberts-race-to-generalize-relativity-6885f44e3cbe</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Iv</author><text>I find it uncanny how a &amp;quot;who got it first?&amp;quot; become a salient question today whereas as the time it was obvious both were excited at collaborating to make a theory that works well.&lt;p&gt;Really makes you wonder what would research would like without the race for publication.&lt;p&gt;What I was taught about this &amp;quot;rivalry&amp;quot; is that Einstein struggled with some parts of the theory and Hilbert proposed some complicated mathematical tools that Einstein at first felt should not be necessary but ended up using after a few months of frustration.</text></comment>