Department of "Huh?!" (Lost in Minkowski Space Department)
I ran across this:
William Patterson: The “Horst-Conrad-Milne” interplanetary space drive of [Robert Heinlein's] Between Planets has become in ** a sophisticated interstellar drive (though Milne got left off the name this time—as sometimes happens in real life; there is plenty of Einstein in Starman Jones, but no mention of Hermann Minkowski)…
I have long known that attacking Albert Einstein for undermining the morals of the West and for being an all-around bad guy was a staple of the whacka-whacka right wing of the American Spectator and its ilk. But I had never heard before that Hermann Minkowski was the unfair slighted discoverer or co-discoverer of Einstein's theory of relativity.
I had heard that there were whacka-whacks who claimed that Voigt, Lorentz, FitzGerald, Poincaré, and Larmor really deserved credit for special relativity. And, indeed, there is enormous credit to be shred that is shared: we do speak of Lorentz invariance, of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, of the Poincaré group of rotations, and of Minkowski space (alas, Larmor does not make it) all as essential parts of Einstein's theory of relativity.
But I had never heard Minkowski. He did not even start to work on relativity until after 1905. I had never heard any hint that it ought to be called the Minkowski or the Einstein-Minkowski theory of relativity--until now.
Anybody know where this comes from?
