Friedwardt Winterberg - Einstein-Hilbert Dispute

Einstein-Hilbert Dispute

Winterberg was also involved in a dispute relating to the history of general relativity in a controversy over the publication of the general relativity field equations (both Albert Einstein and David Hilbert had published them in a very short time span of one another). In 1997, Leo Corry, Jürgen Renn, and John Stachel published an article in Science entitled "Belated decision in the Hilbert-Einstein priority dispute", arguing that, after looking at the original proofs of the article by Hilbert, that they indicated that Hilbert had not anticipated Einstein's equations.

Winterberg published a refutation of these conclusions in 2004, observing that the galley proofs of Hilbert's articles had been tampered with — part of one page had been cut off. He argued that the removed part of the article contained the equations that Einstein later published and alleged that it was part of a "crude attempt by some unknown individual to falsify the historical record." He alleged that Science had refused to print the article and thus he was forced to publish it in Zeitschrift für Naturforschung. Winterberg's article argued that despite the missing part of the proofs, that the correct crucial Field Equation is still imbedded on other pages of the proofs, in various forms, including Hilbert's variational principle with correct Lagrangian from which the Field Equation is immediately derived. Winterberg presented his findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Tampa, Florida in April 2005.

Corry, Renn, and Stachel authored a joint reply to Winterberg, which they claimed Zeitschrift für Naturforschung refused to publish without "unacceptable" modifications, and unable to find a publisher elsewhere, they made it available on the internet. The reply accused Winterberg of misrepresenting the reason why Science would not publish his paper (it had to do with the section of the journal it was scheduled to appear in), and also misrepresenting that the paper published in Zeitschrift für Naturforschung was the same paper he had submitted to Science, and had in fact been "substantially altered" after Winterberg had received their comments on an earlier draft. Actually, Winterberg in his Final Comment had clearly stated that the paper submitted to Science had been a previous version. They also contended that Winterberg was writing in "the paranoid style" (as discussed by Richard Hofstadter) and making vague accusations of conspiracy. They then argue that Winterberg's interpretation of the Hilbert paper was incorrect, that the lost part of the page was unlikely to have been consequential, and that much of Winterberg's reasoning about what could be in the missing piece was incorrect (down to noting Winterberg claims that 1/3 of the page was removed, when actually over half a page is missing total from the two cut off pages) and internally inconsistent. They further argued there was a likely "non-paranoid" explanation for the missing part of the page.

Later, the original reply to Winterberg was removed from their website and replaced with a much shorter statement saying only that Winterberg's conclusions were incorrect, specifically that he had focused on the missing page fragment, "a fact without any bearing on the matter at hand", while failing "to address the substantive difference between the theory expounded in the proofs" of Hilbert. The statement further said that Winterberg had apparently indicated that he was "personally offended" by the original response, the "Max Planck Institute for the History of Science has decided to replace the original, more detailed response to his paper with this abbreviated version". This was, apparently, because the original reply had contained two very derisive statements against Professor Winterberg; later, the Max Planck Society released a note distancing itself from those two statements, without commenting on the underlying scientific dispute.

More recently, Winterberg has written an article stating that Einstein's general theory of relativity cannot be reconciled with quantum theory in Einstein's attempt to reduce all of physics to geometry.