170 RELATIVITY, THE SPECIAL THEORY(the year he spoke in Goettingen) he would never have heard of Einstein's activ-
ities in this area. Shall I write of petulance or professional envy? I shall not, since
my reader's speculations are as good as my own. Could it be that Poincare had
had a mere glance at Einstein's papers and had concluded too hastily that he knew
all that already and that there was nothing new there? Possibly. It would be nei-
ther far-fetched nor a unique occurrence. In his book The Anxiety of Influence,
Harold Bloom writes, 'Strong poets make ... history by misreading one another,
so as to clear imaginative space for themselves,' and speaks of 'strong poets, major
figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors even to the
death' [B5].* In such respects I see little difference between strong poets and
strong creative personalities in any other domain. Poincare's reaction to Riemann
[Kl] and Einstein's to Hilbert (to be discussed in Chapter 14) may be cases in
point. In any event, the questions are interesting and based on fact, the answers
are beyond certain reach. In my opinion, it is more significant that Poincare until
shortly before his death remained silent about Einstein than that Einstein until
shortly before his death remained silent about Poincare. In closing the case of
Poincare and Einstein, I offer their final statements with only minor comments of
my own.
Alexander Moszkowski begins his biography of Einstein [ M2] by recalling that
on October 13,1910, Poincare gave a lecture before the Berliner Wissenschaftliche
Verein about 'die neue Mechanik' (Poincare was quite comfortable with the Ger-
man language). 'In this lecture it happened for the first time that we heard the
name Albert Einstein.' Poincare spoke of 'the beginning of a current which, as he
confessed, had disturbed the equilibrium of his earlier opinions.' Alas, we are not
told in what way the speaker referred to Einstein.
Einstein and Poincare met (for the first and last time, I believe) at the first
Solvay Conference, held in Brussels in October 1911. About this encounter Ein-
stein reported as follows to a friend: 'Poincare war (gegen die Relativitatstheorie)
einfach allgemein ablehnend, zeigte bei allem Scharfsinn wenig Verstandnis fur
die Situation' [E12].** It is apparent once again that Poincare either never under-
stood or else never accepted the special theory of relativity.
Shortly thereafter, the authorities at the ETH, in the course of their prepara-
tions for offering Einstein a professorship, asked Poincare for an opinion about
him. Poincare replied, 'Monsieur Einstein is one of the most original minds I have
known; in spite of his youth he already occupies a very honorable position among
the leading scholars of his time. We must especially admire in him the ease with
which he adapts himself to new concepts and his ability to infer all the conse-
quences from them. He does not remain attached to the classical principles and,
faced with a physics problem, promptly envisages all possibilities. This is trans-
*I would like to thank Sara Pais for directing me to Bloom's book.
**P. was simply generally antipathetic (in regard to relativity theory) and showed little understand-
ing for the situation despite all his sharp wit.