The Einstein conspiracy and the exceptional intelligence nonsense

Some years ago all over the web were news that Albert Einstein was only a plagiarizer. In lack of a better name, I dubbed this theory the Einstein conspiracy.

It initially seemed to me to belong to the same group of findings showing that Luis Pasteur was cheating, Isaac Newton was not really a physicist but mostly worked with the Revelation, Martin Luther King was beating prostitutes and controlled by a notorious communist and so on, but actually is probably belongs to that genre of research which points out that the three geniuses. Einstein, Freud and Marx, were not so great after all. One can add a fourth genius to this group: Franz Boas, who started the anthropology school denying the existence of human races. Freud’s scientific discoveries, the basis of psychoanalysis, were debunked long time ago, the same happened with the scientific communism of Marx. Boas was shown wrong in more recent years, though it is a long while since his student Margaret Mead was discredited. Only Einstein still keeps his reputation, and that for sure irritated some conspiracy theoreticians. Some people had Sibelius, Nurmi and sauna, some other people had Einstein, Freud and Marx, and human envy is so great that these conspiracy theoreticians just have bring to dirt everything.

Or that is what I initially thought, many years ago.

I did look it up and it was not quite so. There was something real in even this improbable conspiracy theory. It is not that Einstein was not a good theoretical physicist. He worked for 55 years in theoretical physics, published his first article in the age of 22, made Ph.D. at the age of 26, and published in total some 300 scientific papers (not all are scientific articles: the figure includes written reviews, comments and corrections). This is a quite good record, but he is considered as the highest human genius, not just a good researcher. Was he the highest genius? That particular field is full of some level geniuses.

Einstein’s Ph.D. thesis contains a new determination of Avogadro’s number. The thesis is not remarkable and the history of the thesis reflects rather typical problems in writing a Ph.D. Einstein started as a Ph.D. student of H.F. Weber, but that lasted only the winter 1900-1901, after which Einstein wanted to change the supervisor and turned to Alfred Kleiner. Einstein submitted a manuscript for a Ph.D. in 1901 to Kleiner, but the work was not satisfactory and Einstein withdrew it in 1902. The manuscript has not survived. It might have been on thermodynamics. Einstein published two papers on thermodynamics in 1902–1903. He had also published a paper in 1901 on the capillary phenomenon. It is difficult to know what the Ph.D. thesis requirements were at that time. Traditionally a Ph.D. thesis has been defined as corresponding to 5 published articles. In 1903 Einstein chose himself the topic for his Ph.D. thesis. The reviewers were Kleiner and Heinrich Burkhard. The calculations in the thesis were considered impressive and the work was accepted. Burkhard checked the calculations but did not notice a significant error in them. The only comment was that the thesis was too short. So, this history was fairly normal, I remember many similar cases, but at the same time as making the Ph.D., Einstein wrote four other papers, the Annulus Mirabilis articles, and we have to look at them to find the genius of Einstein.

Einstein’s fame is based on two sets of four articles each. The first set was published in 1905, the miraculous year. These four articles deal each with a different topic: explaining photoelectric effect, explaining Brownian motion, formulating the theory of special relativity and the last presents the famous formula E = mc².

That is a nice set of remarkable results. But…

It turns out that the Brownian motion actually was explained mathematically by Marian Smoluchowski, who did not publish his results until July 1906, see [1]. Smoluchowski writes in the 1906 article:

“I have not published hitherto the results since I wanted to verify them by the most exact experimental methods. But in the meantime the discussion on this subject was re-opened by two theoretical Einstein’s papers, … (the papers of 1905 and 1906)…. In Einstein’s formulas I found the part of my findings and his final result, which, though obtained by quite different method, agrees completely with mine. Therefore I publish my argumentation,…”

In a letter from 1909 to Jean Perrin Smuluchowski tells: “I should like to state that the priority is of course due to Einstein (1905), the author whose ingenuity and talent inspire my deep respect. It’s my fault that I have delayed until July 1906 the publication of my investigation on this subject, in which I was busy since 1900 (work of Mr. Exner).”

This miraculous article was then not so original, as the problem had already been solved though the solution was not published. In 1910 Einstein wrote an article of the opalecence of liquids, he mentions there an article of Smoluchewski from 1904, see [1]. There is no basis to assume that Einstein had Smoluchowski’s unpublished results before writing the article of 1905, but it is also not possible to prove that he did not.

It is not doubted that Smoluchowski obtained the solution first. The priority goes to Einstein, since he published the results first, that is the normal criteria. Therefore the formula E = mc² should not be considered as Einstein’s result. This formula was known to many others, including Henry Poincaré, but it is also presented in an article published by Olinto De Pretto in 1903 in a scientific magazine and republished in 1904 in 1904 by Veneto’s Royal Science Institute. Certainly these, especially the last one, count as scientific publications. They predate Einstein’s article from 1905. It is indeed possible that Einstein had obtained the result of De Pretto before writing his 1905 article. Einstein could read Italian and he had connections there having lived in Italy with his parents.

So, that is a clear case that the result should not be Einstein’s, and there is a reason to suspect that there may be more to this case. There are still two more miraculous articles.

The third miraculous article explains the photoelectric effect. Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 especially from this article. In my opinion this is just an application of Max Plank’s concept of a quantum. Einstein later belonged to Max Plank’s group of researchers. The important drive behind this article was to get Plank’s quantum concept accepted.

The fourth miraculous article is the special relativity theory. This is the most famous of Einstein’s results, but the theory of special relativity in the article actually follows from the earlier work of Hendrik Lorentz and Henry Poincaré. Curiously, Einstein’s article does not even mention Poincaré. Apparently the submitted manuscript had two authors: Einstein and his first wife Mileva Marić. In the published article there was only Einstein. Probably Marić have made a contribution to the article, but Einstein did not credit her. The transform Einstein uses is directly the Lorentz transform. The new aspect is that Einstein followed Poincaré’s suggestion and dropped the ether and absolute time.

Did Einstein make an important contribution to these results? I think maybe just the opposite. Poincaré wanted to keep the absolute time and actually that could have been the correct way. While absolute time is not needed for describing the movements of material-energy, there may exist more than material-energy. The 4-manifold of time and space can be embedded smoothly to a 10-dimensional Riemannian space, which can have an absolute time.

Dropping the absolute time directed researchers to ignore the possibility that there is more to research. I challenge you to think of the possibility that there is our physical, measurable time and the real time in the real world. It is not a useless exercise.

In 1911 Einstein published his calculations of light bending under gravity. The value Einstein got is the same as Johan Georg von Soldner had derived in 1804. Phillipp Lenard claimed that Einstein plagiarized Soldner’s result, again without any references. Wikipedia explains in Soldner’s pages that “Lenard’s accusation against Einstein is usually considered to have been at least partly motivated by Lenard’s Nazi sympathies…” Of course, the Nazi party was founded much later, in 1920. Actually it does look like Einstein did plagiarize other researchers.

The second set of Einstein’s important articles is from November 1915. In four articles he defines the general relativity theory. Einstein’s theory of gravitation was not the first. A Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordstrom had already published a theory in 1912 and 1913, actually two of them.

There is a controversy concerning the role of David Hilbert. Hilbert invited Einstein to lecture on the problem in June-July 1915. Hilbert worked on the problem since that time. Einstein’s friend Marcel Grossmann pointed to Einstein that the key to his problem was the Riemann tensor. This is probably how Hilbert got involved in this.

In November 4 and 11, 1915 Einstein sent to Hilbert non-covariant and pseudo-Riemannian attempts to the field equations, so Einstein had not solved it yet. In a letter of Einstein to Hilbert from November 18 Einstein writes that Hilbert’s article from 4. November needs to be reconsidered. Hilbert had submitted an article to a journal. There are galley proofs marked December 6, 1915, of this article. There is missing half a page but most is preserved. The equations in these proofs are non-covariant. I think the article from November 4 that Einstein comments in his letter is the submitted article.

Assuming that this is the case, let us try to see who found the covariant (correct) equations first. Hilbert had not found them in November 4 and Einstein had not found then in November 4 and 11.

Einstein submitted a manuscript with covariant equations in November 25 and his article was published extra fast in December 2. This article does not mention Hilbert. Hilbert rewrote the article in March 1916 with identical covariant equations as in Einstein’s paper. This article mentions Einstein. It is only a question what happened between November 11 and November 25.

In November 16 and 17 Hilbert sent to Einstein notes from a talk he had given in 16 November. On November 18 Einstein replied that Hilbert’s equations are equivalent to what he himself had derived in the last four weeks. In November 20 Hilbert lectured on the problem. It follows from these dates and comments that Einstein had a new solution in November 18 and it was the same solution that Hilbert had in November 16. Einstein claims to have found it in the last four weeks, but in November 11 he had not found it. Thus, Hilbert found it first and presented it in November 16 and November 20. Einstein did not independently find it but noticed his problem from the notes Hilbert had sent to him in November 16 and 17. Einstein immediately corrected his paper, submitted it in November 25, and got it published in December 2 without any mention of Hilbert.

This is apparently what happened, so it was foul play from Einstein’s side. Einstein apparently thought that Hilbert tried to steal his result. This is to be understood in the following way: Einstein had invented the problem and worked on it, but could not do math well enough. His friend Grossmann formulated the problem as Riemannian tensors. Then jumps up Hilbert, a mathematician, and tries to publish a solution, which is just as Einstein wanted. Einstein tries to find an error and points to non-covariance. Hilbert fixes it and then Einstein has no other way to save his right to be the creator of his theory but to fast edit a paper and publish it through his contacts in 7 days while delaying Hilbert’s paper and making galleys of the original version of the paper. Does this sound likely? I think so.

There was a less important but a bit similar event in Bose-Einstein statistics. Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose in 1924, but Einstein originally tried to present it as his.

There is also a case when Einstein refused to add his name to a result. He suggested an experiment to Schrödinger and Schrödinger proposed that Einstein be a co-author to the Schrödinger gas model. Einstein declined, but maybe it is since Schrödinger showed what Einstein should have done, but did not do, with De Pretto, Poincaré, Hilbert, Bose and maybe Smuluchowski.

Later scientific work by Einstein was not remarkable. He worked on different cosmological models and on the unified field theory. I found his unified field theory from the library of our theoretical physics department. I was the first to read it through, which I know since nobody had cut separate the pages, they were of cheap paper and unified in one side. Needless to say, the calculations seemed to make no sense to me.

What more Einstein did? He drew attention to the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox. The EPR problem is important and my favorite, but Einstein’s explanation was incorrect. I think the solution is that the effect goes through the history, implying that history changes, implying that the time is not real, implying that this is a simulation world, implying that there is a real world with a real time, implying that ether time should have been kept. That is, EPR does not only partially change the interpretation of quantum physics, it ruins the basis of Einstein’s special and general relativity.

In general one can say that Einstein was a good physicist, not a head taller than the others, but also not a head shorter. He was made a head taller by media and he himself seems to have been quite ambitious to have all results ascribed to him alone.

Einstein, Freud and Marx were all famous and once considered geniuses, Einstein still being thought so, the other two maybe not. Einstein also got a Nobel Prize. The real Einstein conspiracy is not the claim that Einstein maybe stole or plagiarized results, but that Einstein has been used to promote a claim that the high number of Jews among Nobel laureates is a proof and a result of the higher IQ of Jews. This is actually a myth, but it has been promoted for some specific reason, probably in order to justify why there are so many Jews in high positions in the USA in academic and non-academic fields. If it can be agreed that the reason is higher intelligence, then everything is as it should. If it is favoring, nepotism, discrimination, corruption, racism, any of these – then it is not so fine. But the Nobel Prizes and other prizes show that it is simply an IQ matter, or do they?

Higher academic achievement of one ethnic group does not necessarily mean that the reason is a higher average IQ, but it may mean it. It may be the main reason why there are so few black Nobel laureates. Blacks comprise about 15% of the world population. The average IQ of sub-Saharan blacks is around 70, but it is estimated that with educational improvements it could be 80 (with the standard deviation 15). Let us estimate that Nobel Prize winners in science have IQs around 150. A black Nobel laureate in science would have about 4.67 standard deviations above the ethnic average, which means about one in 650,000. There are about one billion blacks, thus one would expect one to two black Nobel laureates in science. So far only one black person has won a Nobel Prize in other fields than peace and literature (W. Arthur Lewis, economics in 1979).

By coincidence the theoretical percentile of black Nobel laureates agrees with the empirical. Let us do a similar calculation with Jewish Nobel laureates. Jews comprise 0.2% of the world population. Up to 2017 they had received 201 Nobel Prizes, which is 22.5% of the total 892. The world population was 7.6 billion in 2017, thus there were 15 million Jews. The rarity 201 in 15 million equals one in 74,626. This rarity corresponds to IQ of 163 in a population, which has the average IQ 100. We are told that average Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is much higher than 100, say 110. The 201 highest IQ Jews have IQs at least 173. Should it not be that the Nobel laureates have average IQ 173, or is it so that too few Jews get a Nobel Prize and is discrimination against Jews? Or is there some mistake?

There is no mistake. The calculation only shows that not every Jew, who has IQ over 150, gets a Nobel Prize. This is correct. Likewise, not every black person, who has IQ over 150, is expected to get a Nobel Prize. The one science Nobel may be a coincidence, or black average genetic IQ is higher than 80, or Nobel Prizes have little to do with average IQ. The correct answer is probably the last one.

Let us still continue with the average IQs and Nobel Prizes. Nobel Prizes are roughly divided in the following way: USA 371, UK 129, Germany 107, France 68, Scandinavia 59, the rest of Western Europe 123, Eastern Europe 76, the rest of the former British Empire 50, Far East 39, Israel 12, rest of the world 52.

This means that English speaking countries have won 371+129+50=550 times, other European countries have won 107+68+59+123+76=433 times and all other countries 39+12+52=103 times. The population of the English speaking countries and other European countries is roughly 750 million. They have got 983 Nobel prizes. The rarity is about one in 763,000. We notice that Jews are getting Nobel prizes about 10 times as often as other white people, but how often a white person with IQ at least 150 is a Nobel laureate?

Let us keep the average IQ of a Nobel laureate as 150 (for simplicity, not dividing prizes into science and other). The rarity of IQ 150 is one in 2,330. If only one in 763,000 wins of Nobel, then one person out of 327 of the people with IQ at least 150 gets a Nobel Prize. Of Jews one in 74,626 wins a Nobel, it is one person out of 32 of the people with IQ at least 150.

There are two possible reasons why there are so many Jewish Nobel laureates. The first possibility is that Jews are genetically different from other white people: there are much more Jew with IQ over 150 than one of 2,330. It can be that Jewish average IQ is 110, or even 124, or they can have a higher standard deviation. Strangely enough, European Jews closely resemble Italians genetically and there is no reason to think they are genetically special. The second possibility is that also in the Jewish population about one in 2,330 has IQ over 150, but intelligent Jews have a much better chance of getting a Nobel Prize than average whites: their chance is about ten times better. This second explanation does not rule out the possibility that Jewish average IQ in the US and the UK is 110. They are more educated. Education increases the average IQ, but does very little to the rarity of high intelligence.

Is it possible that some group would have a much better chance even though the IQs do not differ much? Of course it is possible. We have an example: men versus women.

According to one study women have a 101.41 mean IQ with a 13.55 standard deviation while men have a 103.08 mean IQ with a 14.54 standard deviation (SD). Then IQ 150 is 3.177 SD for men and 3.586 SD for women. The rarities are the same as between IQs 147.655 and 153.79 for SD=15. The rarities are about one in 1,300 and one in 6,000. If the distribution of Nobel Prizes depended mainly on IQ, we would expect to find about 4.6 men per one woman, but the reality is different. A science a Nobel Prize has been given to over 500 men and 15 women, about 33 men per one woman. Men have about 7 times better chance that IQ would suggest. There must be another reason why men receive more Nobel Prizes in science than women. A similar reason can explain why Jews receive so many Nobel Prizes.

The reasons are not difficult to find. Most women have different interests and there are much more men pursuing a scientific career than women, while in the USA, and maybe elsewhere, the portion of Jewish students of all white students in top private universities (the ivy league) is about 10 times higher than the population sizes would indicate. Prestigious education opens doors to many high level jobs and consequently the ethnic background of professor, CEOs, Presidential advisors, Supreme Court judges or top journalists is often Jewish. Being in a correct place greatly improves the chances of getting a Nobel Prize.

In order to become a Nobel laureate you must work on a problem that is seen worthy of a Nobel Prize, then you have to publish important results and lastly, other researchers must know about these results and think that they are very important. The last usually requires scientific networking. The middle one usually requires having many cleaver people in the same place, that is, the critical mass, and a large budget to do research with, enough time for research, and good publication channels. Because of these requirements, important results are more often done in top universities and other leading research institutes than somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The first one, to work on a worthy problem, means simply that those problems that the top universities study are worthy, while something that is only studied in less important places are less important. Researchers from less important universities are advised to network with the leading researchers.

Academic achievement does not only or even mainly depend on the national, ethnic or gender differences in the average or standard deviation of IQ, but yes, it can depend on many things, like your nationality, ethnicity, gender, location, economic situation, education, connections, how hard you work and even on good luck.

But there indeed was an Einstein conspiracy, even two. The conspiracy theory that Einstein did not give credit to other researchers, and maybe even stole or plagiarized, is quite possible considering what is known. The other conspiracy theory, that Einstein is an example of the superior intelligence of an ethnic group, is real. There is this effort, made for some purpose, and not justified by facts.

References:

[1] http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet.pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_10/R-2_Sredniawa.pdf