TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE HISTORY OF THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY:

1. Who first published the "Lorentz transformations"?

Albert Einstein
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
Joseph Larmor 
George Francis FitzGerald
Emil Cohn
Woldemar Voigt 
Henri Poincare

 

2. Who signed the 1905 Annalen der Physik papers attributed to Albert Einstein?

Albert Einstein
Mileva Einstein-Marity
Max Planck 
Ferdinand Lindemann
Michele Besso
Paul Drude 
Marcel Grossmann

 

3. Who first proposed that gravitational effects might propagate at light speed?

Albert Einstein
George-Louis Le Sage
Rudolf Mewes 
Paul Gerber
Wilhelm Weber
Francois-Felix Tisserand 
Samuel Oppenheim

 

4. How many references to the work of others are found in Mileva Maric and Albert Einstein’s unoriginal 1905 paper on the principle of relativity, and Albert Einstein’s unoriginal 25 November 1915 paper on the field equations of gravitation, combined?

23
14
8
7
2
1
0

 

5. Who won the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity?

Albert Einstein
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
Robert Andrews Millikan 
Max Born
Wolfgang Pauli
Max Planck 
No One

 

6. Who first predicted that the deflection of a light ray grazing the sun coming from infinity and passing to infinity is twice the Newtonian prediction?

Albert Einstein
Karl Schwarzschild
Henry Cavendish 
Pierre Simon de Laplace
Simeon-Denis Poisson
Johann Georg von Soldner 
Camille Flammarion

 

7. Who created the generally covariant field equations of gravitation in the general theory of relativity?

Albert Einstein
Hermann Minkowski
Henri Poincare 
David Hilbert
Marcel Grossmann
Harry Bateman
Vladimir Varicak

 

8. Who first published the correct formula for the perihelion motion of the planet Mercury?

Albert Einstein
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
Henri Poincare
Karl Schwarzschild
Paul Gerber
Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier 
Paul Drude

 

9. Who first stated the principle of relativity of electrodynamics?

Albert Einstein
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
Joseph Larmor 
George Francis FitzGerald
Emil Cohn
Galileo 
Henri Poincare

 

10. Who first published "Mach's principle"?

Albert Einstein
Ernst Mach
George Berkeley 
David Hume
John Locke
William Kingdon Clifford
Bernhard Riemann

 

How did you do?

- Two points or less, novice.
- Three to five points, above average knowledge of the history.
- Six to eight points, excellent knowledge of the history.
- Nine or ten points, you must have read Bjerknes's books!

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