Whittaker, Einstein, and the <i>History of the Aether</i> : Alternative interpretation, blunder, or bigotry?
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Edmund T. Whittaker’s second edition of his A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity is famous for his treatment of Einstein as an almost irrelevant character in the emergence of what he called “the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz.” Historians of science have given a number of explanations, which include Whittaker’s scientific conservatism as an old classical physicist, his commitment to the ether, the pre-eminent role he attributed to mathematics over physics, and foundational philosophical disagreements, to name a few. And in the background, often more implicit than forthright, the accusation of antisemitism looms over Whittaker. In this paper I intend to shed new light on this controversy by taking into consideration the abundant correspondence between Whittaker and his son preserved in the archives of the Fisher Library, University of Toronto. With it, we will get a more complex and personal view of the context in which his attempt at dethroning Einstein took place. Together with the abovementioned reasons, this correspondence shows that the problematic status quo of general relativity in the early 1950s, a period that has been described as the low-mark of general relativity, was very influential in the historical treatment he gave to Einstein. This is an aspect hardly mentioned in the historical work on this controversy and, from this correspondence, it appears to be central to understanding Whittaker at the time of drafting the new History. His possible antisemitic bias will also be addressed, though with the insufficient information on this subject the matter cannot be settled.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it