Was Einstein a plagiarist? Several articles have been written saying he was. What do you think? –mcsage1, via e-mail
Patience. We shall address both matters. Plagiarism first.
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Questions of priority have long swirled around the theories of relativity, both special and general. Though no one thinks Einstein confected special relativity out of thin air, his 1905 paper had no notes or references, which was odd even for the times. In fact, as Einstein’s critics long ago demonstrated, virtually all the better-known elements of the theory–most famously, the equivalence of matter and energy (E = mc2)–had previously been suggested by others. Two men in particular, French mathematician Henri Poincare and Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, are credited with anticipating many of Einstein’s discoveries.
Having addressed the sublime, we now turn to the pathetic. When I last looked into the matter, Einstein’s brain was in the possession of Thomas Harvey, who had performed the autopsy when Einstein died at Princeton in 1955. Harvey had kept the brain in hopes of making a rep for himself as a researcher but was unequipped to do more than an elementary examination of the brain himself and too timid to organize a research program involving the heavyweights. So for more than 40 years he just hung on to the thing, which he had sliced into hundreds of pieces, stored at times in mayonnaise jars. Periodically fending off inquiries from nosy journalists, he bounced around the country, working as a pathologist, a small-town doctor, and finally a factory worker after he failed a medical licensing exam at age 77. Having retired and moved back to New Jersey, Harvey in 1998 donated the brain to the man who held his old job as chief pathologist at the Princeton hospital. Scientists to whom Harvey lent chunks of the brain published three papers over the years, so I suppose the whole thing wasn’t a complete waste; still, when I shuffle off to that big reading room in the sky, I’m leaving strict instructions: No souvenirs.
