Publications

Critique et compte-rendu

In this curious slim book of 135 pages comprising a Preface, an Introduction, ten chapters and a Conclusion, the author, professor of physics at Toulon University, pretends to “put an end to [the] long-running controversy” (xii) over the paternity of the special theory of relativity. It is well known that, over the last century, some scientists have promoted the idea that the French mathematician Henri Poincaré was the first to propose the ’theory of relativity‘ in two papers titled “Sur la dynamique de l’électron”: the first was presented on June 5, 1905 at the meeting of the French Academy of Science and printed four days later in its Comptes Rendus (Poincaré 1905); the second and much longer one was published in December 1906 in the Italian Journal Rendiconti del Circolo Mathematico di Palermo (Poincaré 1906). By comparison, Albert Einstein had submitted his own paper on June 30th 1905, and it was published in the September 1905 issue of the German journal Annalen der Physik, under the title “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Einstein 1905).

Gingras, Y. (2025). A physicist’s history of relativity. Metascience, 1-5.