Comment on Galina Weinstein's article entitled "Convergences and Divergences: Einstein Poincaré and Special Relativity"

Jean-Marc Ginoux

公開日: 2025/9/25

Abstract

In 2024, after thirty years of research on this subject, I published a book entitled: Poincar\'e, Einstein and the discovery of special relativity. An end to the controversy (Ginoux2024). In September 2025, Galina Weinstein published a review of this book entitled: Convergences and Divergences: Einstein Poincar\'e and Special Relativity (arXiv:2509.09361) in which she aimed "to show how Einstein's ether-free, principle-based kinematics marked out a path that, unlike its contemporaries, became the canonical form of special relativity.'' To this end, she claimed to reconstruct "in a novel way, the 1905 derivations of Einstein and Poincar\'e, highlighting their contrasting paths''. In her paper, she proposed a mathematical presentation of "the 1905 derivations of Poincar\'e and Einstein''. And then, she pretended to trace "their similarities and, more importantly, their differences.'' Unfortunately, Weinstein's review of my book contains a number of mistakes, falsehoods and misleading criticisms that I would like to point out here. To this aim, I will follow the structure of Weinstein's paper and show section by section all the erroneous historical facts she has reported.