I have been given a copy of Christopher Jon Bjerknes’ Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist (2002), and by coincidence I also linked to the Quora.com discussion “Was Einstein a Fake and a Plagiarist?” The very-much establishment site Quora had the usual fan boy responses to those questioning sacred cows.
Interestingly enough a lot of attention was given to the views of Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, who became of chief of Aryan physics under the Nazi regime. Naturally, Lenard’s claims of Einstein’s plagiarism must be dismissed, as Nazi propaganda.
However, one Quora comment, by Wasim Bari, makes the case that Einstein was the “plagiarist of the century.”
The key ideas in his 1905 paper, written without any references, were known to Lorentz and Poincaré before Einstein.
The famous E = mc2 equation was known to S. Tolver Preston (1875) and to Jules Herin Poincaré (1900), along with Olinto De Pretto (1904), before Einstein.
All of the basics of the special theory of relativity had been presented by Poincaré, such as the velocity of light as a limit velocity that mass depends upon speed and the impossibility of detecting absolute motion. None of this was acknowledged by Einstein in his unreferenced 1905 paper.
The interesting question is, if all of this is true, and Bjerknes’ book gives ample evidence, why has the media promoted the image of “St. Albert”? And, what other scientific sacred cows, have yet to be exposed?