Jewish Invention Myths: Mass-Energy Equivalence (E = mc2)

One of the most common jewish invention myths is the claim that Albert Einstein discovered or invented Mass-Energy Equivalence in Physics and that he was the first to formulate and prove the E = mc2 equation.

For example, ‘My Christian Learning’ claims that:

‘#5: Mass-energy equivalence

Better known by its formula E = mc², mass-energy equivalence is the the mass of an object is a measure of its energy concept. This formula was used in the creation of the atomic bomb.

However, before the atomic bomb was a thought in someone’s mind, it was the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein who was the first to introduce the idea that mass-energy equivalence is a fundamental principle in the symmetries of space and time.’ (1)

While ‘MNews’ claims that:

‘1. Albert Einstein – Theory of relativity

The physicist Albert Einstein is the author of the theory of relativity, which changed the way we understand our Universe. At the dawn of the first technological century, Einstein discovered that matter is inexhaustible in its properties. His famous equation: E = mc 2 has become synonymous with the concept that energy and mass are interchangeable.’ (2)

Indeed E = mc2 is widely credited to Einstein’s 1905 paper ‘Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?’ without many of those claiming such realizing that the famous formula does not appear in that article at all. (3)

What does appear is the following sentence which translated from the German reads:

‘If a body releases the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/V2’ (4)

This was then translated into E = mc2 later, but Einstein certainly was the first to use it since Austrian physicist Fritz Hasenöhrl coined E = 3/8mc2 a year earlier in 1904 and – as Philip Ball and Tony Rothman point out – it is hard to imagine that Einstein wasn’t aware of Hasenöhrl’s work. (5)

Indeed E = mc2 was almost certainly going to happen anyway as Ball explains:

‘The relationship of energy and mass was already being widely discussed by the time Hasenöhrl considered the matter. Henri Poincaré had stated that electromagnetic radiation had a momentum and thus effectively a mass, according to E = mc2. German physicist Max Abraham argued that a moving electron interacts with its own field, E0, to acquire an apparent mass given by E0 = 3/4 mc2. All this was based on classical electrodynamics, assuming an ether theory. “Hasenöhrl, Poincaré, Abraham and others suggested that there must be an inertial mass associated with electromagnetic energy, even though they may have disagreed on the constant of proportionality”, says Boughn.

Robert Crease, a philosopher and historian of science at Stony Brook University in New York, agrees. “Historians often say that, had there been no Einstein, the community would have converged on special relativity shortly”, he says. “Events were pushing them kicking and screaming in that direction.” Boughn and Rothman’s work, he says, shows that Hasenöhrl was among those headed this way.’ (6)

And Rothman explains in detail that E = mc2 had been prefigured long before Einstein’s famous 1905 papers:

‘In 1881 J. J. Thomson, later a discoverer of the electron, made the first attempt to demonstrate how this might come about by explicitly calculating the magnetic field generated by a moving charged sphere and showing that the field in turn induced a mass into the sphere itself.

The effect is entirely analogous to what happens when you drop a beach ball to the ground. The force of gravity pulls the ball downward; buoyancy and drag forces from the air impede the ball’s fall. But this is not the whole story. Drag or no drag, in order to fall the ball must push the air ahead of it out of the way and this air has mass. The “effective” mass of the falling beach ball is consequently larger than the mass of the ball at rest. Thomson understood that the field of the sphere should act like the air before the beach ball; in his case the effective mass of the sphere was the entire mass induced by the magnetic field.

Thomson’s slightly complicated result depended on the object’s charge, radius and magnetic permeability, but in 1889 English physicist Oliver Heaviside simplified his work to show that the effective mass should be m = (4⁄3) E / c2, where E is the energy of the sphere’s electric field. German physicists Wilhelm Wien, famous for his investigations into blackbody radiation, and Max Abraham got the same result, which became known as the “electromagnetic mass” of the classical electron (which was nothing more than a tiny, charged sphere). Although electromagnetic mass required that the object be charged and moving, and so clearly does not apply to all matter, it was nonetheless the first serious attempt to connect mass with energy.

It was not, however, the last. When Englishman John Henry Poynting announced in 1884 a celebrated theorem on the conservation of energy for the electromagnetic field, other scientists quickly attempted to extend conservation laws to mass plus energy. Indeed, in 1900 the ubiquitous Henri Poincaré stated that if one required that the momentum of any particles present in an electromagnetic field plus the momentum of the field itself be conserved together, then Poynting’s theorem predicted that the field acts as a “fictitious fluid” with mass such that E = mc2. Poincaré, however, failed to connect E with the mass of any real body.

The scope of investigations widened again in 1904 when Fritz Hasenöhrl created a thought experiment involving heat energy in a moving cavity. Largely forgotten today except by Einstein detractors, Hasenöhrl was at the time more famous than the obscure patent clerk. Then one of Austria’s leading physicists, he wrote a prize-winning trilogy of papers, “On the theory of radiation in moving bodies,” the last two of which appeared in the Annalen der Physik in 1904 and early 1905.’ (7)

Both Ball and Rothman’s point here is not that Einstein wasn’t correct but rather that crediting E = mc2 solely to Einstein is impossible to do honestly. We can argue whether Einstein’s equation was right or not, but it is next to impossible to argue that Einstein came up with the concept on his own in his famous 1905 ‘Annus mirabilis’ per the mainstream scientific narrative.

After all – as Ball explains – E = mc2 does not require Einstein’s theory of relativity and is just building on previous research by other people:

‘But if that’s the case, where does relativity come into it? Actually, perhaps it doesn’t. While Einstein’s celebrated 1905 paper, “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”, clearly laid down the foundations of relativity by abandoning the ether and making the speed of light invariant, his derivation of E = mc2 did not depend on those assumptions. You can get the right answer with classical physics, says Rothman, all in an ether theory without c being either constant or the limiting speed. “Although Einstein begins relativistically, he approximates away all the relativistic bits, and you are left with what is basically a classical calculation.”’ (8)

Hence if we are honest; we have to primarily credit both Fritz Hasenöhrl and Henri Poincaré with E = mc2 if we follow the traditional narrative or we have to credit Italian inventor Olino de Pretto with it. Since de Pretto published the E = mc2 equation first in 1903 which was then republished in 1904, and it is quite possible that Hasenöhrl took his 1904 formula from de Pretto and modified it in accordance with his own views as we know Einstein almost certainly did as his correspondent Michele Besso alerted him in a latter to de Pretto’s paper before Einstein’s two famous papers of 1905 were written. (9) This is further evidenced by the fact that Einstein didn’t even prove his own theory in 1905 – which is an odd lacuna in Einstein’s orthodox biography – and instead this was left to - and done by - others. (10)

Hence we can see that Einstein did not discover or invent Mass-Energy Equivalence and nor he was he the first to use the famous formula E = mc2 which should either be primarily credited to Fritz Hasenöhrl, Henri Poincaré and/or Olino de Pretto.

References

(1) https://www.christianlearning.com/jewish-inventions/

(2) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions

(3) For example: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/05/einstein-equation-emc2-special-relativity-alok-jha

(4) https://einsteinrelativelyeasy.com/index.php/einstein/71-einstein-paper-outlines-e-mc2-november-21-1905

(5) https://physicsworld.com/a/did-einstein-discover-e-mc2/; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/was-einstein-the-first-to-invent-e-mc2/

(6) https://physicsworld.com/a/did-einstein-discover-e-mc2/

(7) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/was-einstein-the-first-to-invent-e-mc2/

(8) https://physicsworld.com/a/did-einstein-discover-e-mc2/

(9) https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/nov/11/rorycarroll

(10) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/was-einstein-the-first-to-invent-e-mc2/