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[2] viXra:1010.0059 [pdf] submitted on 28 Oct 2010
Authors: Henri Poincaré, Nicolae Mazilu
Comments: 15 pages, translated to English
Rarely, if ever, was the human spirit under a closer critical scrutiny than in the following
masterpiece of the great scientist of the 19th and 20th centuries, Henri Poincaré. The work
itself is seldom cited. Yet, the reader can find in it all the objections that can be raised
against the main scientific inventions of the human spirit. They are still valid today, exactly
as they were more than a century ago, or three centuries ago, for that matter.
It is, first and foremost, advisable to pay close attention to the definition of central forces
as given by Poincaré. Like all of the classics of science, he understood them with a string attached:
their magnitude should depend only on the distance between points. Einstein himself used the
definition of central forces in that connotation when he judged the whole system of the classical
mechanics and introduced the general relativity. However, the very first definition of the central
forces, as it appears in Newton's Principia, doesn't ask anything of the kind. What can we say,
but repeat with Nietzsche: the first reaction is usually the right one!
It is also advisable to pay attention to the critique of the concept of energy: it stands even
today as it was then, in this work of Poincaré. Yet, in spite of the overwhelming cases against
energy, the theoretical physics doesn't seem to stop speculating upon the kinds of energy that
might exist in the world. Finally, it is worth paying attention to the criticism of the way in which
Hertz assigns matter through a hypothesis: it seems like the hypothesis of missing mass of today.
It is our conviction that this masterpiece is not quite known to the English speaking readers. This
is why we undertook here the burden of its translation. We hope to give it another chance, in order
to have, at least nowadays, more than a century from its first publication, the impact it deserves
on the human spirit.
Category: History and Philosophy of Physics
[1] viXra:1010.0051 [pdf] submitted on 20 Mar 2010
Authors: Mihàly Bencze
Comments: 5 pages
Dr. Florentin Smarandache is a polymath: as author, co-author, translator, co-translator,
editor, or co-editor of 143 books and 183 scientific papers and notes.
On December 10th, 2009, he was 55 years old.
Category: History and Philosophy of Physics
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