On the Histories of Relativity: The Propagation and Elaboration of Relativity Theory in Participant Histories in Germany, 1905-1911

Abstract

This essay explores the history and historiography of relativity through a study of the earliest, participant, histories of the subject. The author argues that participant histories from Einstein, Planck, Minkowski, and others provided an important means of shaping understandings of relativity--at a time when the theory was subject to major controversy and debate. One feature of the study is thus a detailed investigation of the use of historical resources in scientific research. Second, the accounts discussed provide a means of surveying the development of relativity in Germany. Here their changing attributions of authorship--and the particular nature of research histories offered by Einstein and Minkowski--reveal features of the relationship between the work of Lorentz, Einstein, and Minkowski that are in some tension with the understanding built up by previous historians. The study therefore offers a new perspective on the complex process through which a plurality of approaches--many relativities with many histories--could become singular--one theory, one history--and through which the work of Einstein came to be sharply distinguished from that of others.

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