MG13 - Talk detail

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In 1904 Henri Poincaré was the first to point at the need to modify classical theory of gravitation due to the crucial role of the speed of light in the emergent relativity theory. Consequently in his own detailed contribution to such a theory a year later (independently from Einstein) he developed a relativistic gravitation theory. Unlike the later General Relativity, his theory was a minimal modification of Newtonian theory, so us to make it compatible with the (special) principle of relativity, leading to a Lorentz covariant theory with a constant gravitational mass. As poincaré pointed out, the resulted theory fitted planetary observations at least as well as Newton’s theory, suffering also from the same empirical anomalies, which, however, did not seem problematic at the time. In this talk I will argue that physicists did not adopt Poincaré’s theory due to its assumptions and character (e.g. its consequential deny of gravitation of energy, lack of a field concept), rather than due to its empirical results.

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