LEARN TO LEARN: Henri Poincaré, Not Einstein, Discovered Gravitational Waves, 111 years Ago

Physics Nobel Committee Should Learn Physics! And the notion of truth!

The truth shall not just make us free, but also safe, and moral. Teaching thinking is to teach truth and how to get to it. One should start by not deliberately lying. And understanding when it is that humanity started to understand something.

Intellectuals should revere the truth. If Satan speaks the truth, intellectuals should quote him approvingly.Why? Because ethics is truth! The Nobel in Physics was given to screwdriver turners for “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”

However the rest of the press release from the Nobel committee on physics is a lie: it attributes the original idea of gravitational waves to a German. Surely the physicists who sit on the Nobel Committee are knowledgeable enough to know this is a lie. That sort of lies may sounds innocuous, it’s not: it’s anti-scientific, and proto-Nazi. It teaches the youth wrong. It teaches present day Nazis wrong.

The generation of waves by a central source field is easy to understand in primary school.

It’s because of these sorts of nationalistic distortions that Germans, a century ago, got so full of hubris that they went mad: everybody told them they invented everything! Everybody told Germans they were the superior race! And Max Planck was one of the prophets of this German superiority. ! And the hated French, were nothing, because that “inferior race” had invented nothing! Thus, naturally enough, since they were told from everywhere that they were so smart, the Germans decided to subjugate the rest of humanity, be it only to enlighten it (that was the idea of Keynes in “The Economic Consequence of Peace”).

Actually, it’s not a German who discovered, and named, “Relativity”, but a Frenchman.    

In press releases announcing the detection of gravitational waves, the collaborations LIGO and VIRGO, as well as the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France), explicitly (and WRONGLY) attributed to the German Albert Einstein the original prediction of the existence of gravitational waves in 1916. A similar comment is made in the Physical Review Letters article by LIGO and VIRGO.

But actually, gravitational waves traveling at the speed of light, were clearly predicted by Henri Poincaré on June 5, 1905, as a relativistic requirement. Poincaré made this requirement explicit in his academic note Sur la dynamique de l’électron (On electron dynamics, June 5, 1905) published by the French Académie des Sciences.

At the time, Poincaré was already world famous, and Einstein, nothing. Planck, a German nationalist, would make Einstein everything by allowing Einstein to publish articles without any reference on preceding he knew about, and parroted. This was sheer propaganda.

After explicitly formulating special relativity in this fundamental article, Poincaré further develops the requirement suggested by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz that the new space-time transformation leading to special relativity should apply to all existing forces and not just to the electromagnetic interaction. (At the insistence of Poincaré, Lorentz got the Nobel for Relativity in 1902)

Henri Poincaré concludes that, as a consequence of the new space-time geometry, gravitation must generate waves traveling at the speed of light in a similar way to electromagnetism.

Following the pre-Nazi German nationalistic propaganda contained in the press releases of scientific collaborations and institutions, almost all medias attribute to Albert Einstein the original prediction of gravitational waves.

The Physical Review Letters article by LIGO and VIRGO Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger,  PRL 116, 061102 (11 February 2016), explicitly sates https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 : “In 1916, the year after the final formulation of the field equations of general relativity, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves”. What, then, about the work done by Henri Poincaré 11 years before the Einstein finding ?

Actually, the situation seems quite clear. In his short article of 5 June 1905 Sur la dynamique de l’électron, C.R. T.140 (1905) 1504-1508 (Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, France), http://www.academie-sciences.fr/pdf/dossiers/Poincare/Poincare_pdf/Poincare_CR1905.pdf , the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré explicitly formulated special relativity upgrading the space-time transformations that he called “Lorentz transformations” and to which he referred as the “Lorentz group”. After having worked out and discussed the new space-time geometry, Poincaré writes:

… Mais ce n’est pas tout: Lorentz, dans l’Ouvrage cité, a jugé nécessaire de compléter son hypothèse en supposant que toutes les forces, quelle qu’en soit l’origine, soient affectées, par une translation [a change of inertial frame in Poincaré’s language], de la même manière que les forces électromagnétiques, et que, par conséquent, l’effet produit sur leurs composantes par la transformation de Lorentz est encore défini par les équations (4).

Il importait d’examiner cette hypothèse de plus près et en particulier de rechercher quelles modifications elle nous obligerait à apporter aux lois de la gravitation [HOW TO MODIFY GRAVITATION]. C’est ce que j’ai cherché à déterminer; j’ai été d’abord conduit à supposer que la propagation de la gravitation n’est pas instantanée, mais se fait avec la vitesse de la lumière. (…)

Quand nous parlerons donc de la position ou de la vitesse du corps attirant, il s’agira de cette position ou de cette vitesse à l’instant où l’onde gravifique [GRAVITATIONAL WAVE] est partie de ce corps; quand nous parlerons de la position ou de la vitesse du corps attiré, il s’agira de cette position ou de cette vitesse à l’instant où ce corps attiré a été atteint par l’onde gravifique émanée de l’autre corps; il est clair que le premier instant est antérieur au second… [End of quote]

Gravitational waves were thus explicitly predicted by Henri Poincaré in his 5 june 1905 article formulating special relativity. All of these ideas got incorporated in the gravitational wave equation of Einstein (who worked closely, day by day, with a number of top mathematicians at the time, including crack mathematician David Hilbert, who found a different approach).

In special relativity, such as already defined explicitly, with all its equations, by Poincaré and Lorentz, the speed of light c is not just the speed of a specific object (light) but a universal constant defining (local) space-time geometry. As a consequence, no physical object, signal, or correlation can travel faster than c. Poincaré explained in extreme details the philosophy behind it (if something is always true, it’s a law of nature), in a book which Einstein and his student friends studied in thorough detail (although Einstein didn’t quote Poincaré in his famous 1905 parrot work, naturally enough for a nationalistic parrot (later Einstein would have a fall-out with another French Nobel, Bergson, about Relativity).

According to Poincaré in his article of 5 June 1905, the requirement of a universal space-time geometry with the speed of light c as the critical speed implies that the gravitational force must be propagated by gravitational waves with a speed equal to c , just as electromagnetic waves carry the electromagnetic interaction.

As Henri Poincaré explicitly underlines, the space-time geometry defined by Lorentz tranformations applies to all existing forces including the gravitational ones. Thus, gravitation cannot propagate instantaneously and must instead propagate at the speed of light. The same argument clearly applies to any object associated to gravitation.

Considering as a simple example the gravitational interaction between two bodies, Poincaré introduces a “gravific wave” leaving the first body, traveling at the speed of light and reaching the second body at a later time. This was the original formulation of the prediction of gravitational waves in a context where its general scope was obvious. Poincaré had been working for years on electromagnetism, and knew perfectly well that more sophisticated scenarios than the example he was providing could be imagined without altering the role of c as the critical speed.

A decade later, with general relativity, Albert Einstein considered in detail more involved scenarios than the one made explicit by Poincaré, incorporating in particular an effective space-time curvature generated by gravitation in a static universe. But this does not invalidate the basic principle discovered and formulated by Henri Poincaré in 1905.

In his article, Poincaré also refers to the previous work by Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Count of Laplace (1749-1827), one of the main French scientists of the period of Napoléon Bonaparte. Laplace had already considered the possibility that gravitation propagates at some finite speed, but he did not question the basic space-time geometry.

Poincaré had demonstrated and published E = m c^2… in 1900, more than 5 years before Einstein plagiarized it.

I have talked about this for years. I am happy that Science 2.0 picked up the notion in “Henri Poincaré Predicted The Existence Of Gravitational Waves As Early As June 5, 1905”

Correct attribution of civilization defining discoveries is fundamental. Example: India discovered numbers & zero as used today.

The chronological hierarchy of discoveries reflects, in general, the logical hierarchy of evidence supporting these discoveries. Whether in science, or in global thinking. Thus who discovered what, when, how and why, is not just anecdotal. it’s logical, according to the most natural logic.

As it turns out, few places in spacetime made most civilization defining discoveries, and then they made plenty of them, and that was related to political processes: a few Greek city-states, especially Ionian cities and Athens and Paris and its satellites are obvious examples.

One can learn to learn better, one can learn to think better, this is what the existence of concentrations of civilizational genesis, show.

It’s crucially important to understand what made these places tick and how, with the aim of reproducing such circumstances. Paris was the pioneering place in science, worldwide, for around a millennium, and this was the core mental skeleton of Europe, and even civilization. Buridan discovered in particular the inertia, thus the heliocentric system (attributed to Copernicus, well after the Catholic Church made studying Buridan into a capital crime!), Lamarck, evolution (taught in Paris while forbidden in England, etc… The same crowd probably wants us to believe in Donald Trump and Neo Liberalism, as no good idea could possibly come from anywhere else not Germanoido-Anglo-Saxon. The Nobel Committee is dominated by US physicists anxious to demonstrate US superiority and, in particular, the superiority of US universities, because there is beaucoup money in it, and it could please their sponsors (the tax-free plutocrats).

It’s also important to make correct attributions, because the original authors are always clearer about their reasonings, and how they got there. Plagiarists tend to be more obscure, because they hide their tracks.

Re-attributing the correct discoveries can be shattering, and teaches us how obscurantism proceeds to eradicate knowledge. The disappearance, for two millennia, of non-Euclidean geometry, is a case in point. So is that of atomism, and “Brownian” motion. The suppression of Buridan and the heliocentric system, by the Christian church is a particularly sinister instance: it was vicious, deliberate, and motivated by the hatred for thinking..

So let’s celebrate the discovery of gravitational waves. My little drawing above shows that one does not need even relativity to make waves. A big motion of the source will do, as anybody watching a tsunami on TV knows.

The gravitational wave detectors inaugurate a new sort of measuring instrument. However, the idea is at least as old as the Michelson and Morley interferometer of the Nineteenth Century. There is nothing new to it. (That’s why I called the laureates “screwdriver turners.)

And what of Planck, Einstein’s unhinged sponsor? Planck signed a disgusting message in World War One denying Germany had committed war crimes (he later denounced it, when the war was over). The French made one of Planck’s sons prisoner in World War One, and the other son was caged and executed by Hitler. That Hitler interlocutor, Max Planck, got, unfortunately, not just for him, but all humanity, his just deserts. But let’s not keep on having them now. Want Relativity? Think Henri Poincaré, forget about his parrots!

Planck enabled Einstein to post in the Annalen der Physik, the oldest journal in physics (1799), WITHOUT any reference, on the three most famous subjects in physics at the time. It was vicious and deliberate, to serve the satanic god of hyper-nationalism of the racist type. Playing with hyper-nationalism, Planck ended up losing, and Einstein, and the German Jews, became double losers (they lost as Germans and as Jews). So here is a case of the losers writing history… German hyper nationalism was encouraged by Einstein and Planck, with a false flag attribution, and they, and their kind, lost twice.

Truth is not seen just with the eyes. Truth is seen through the mind of a thorough debate.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Tags: Henri Poincaré, Relativity