---
title: "Criticism of the theory of relativity"
chunk: 8/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_relativity"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:36:32.666932+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

While the theory of relativity was enthusiastically studied in Japan and China, it faced criticism in nations with older  scientific establishments.
Shortly before and during World War I, there appeared some nationalistically motivated criticisms of relativity and modern physics. For example, French theoretical physicists Pierre Duhem regarded relativity as the product of the "too formal and abstract" German spirit, which was in conflict with "common sense".
In Germany the Jewish ancestry of some leading relativity proponents such as Einstein and Minkowski made them targets of racially minded critics, although many of Einstein's German critics did not show evidence of such motives. The engineer Paul Weyland, a known nationalistic agitator, arranged the first public meeting against relativity in Berlin in 1919. While Lenard and Stark were also known for their nationalistic opinions, they declined to participate in Weyland's rallies, and Weyland's campaign eventually fizzled out due to a lack of prominent speakers. Lenard and others instead responded to Einstein's challenge to his professional critics to debate his theories at the scientific conference held annually at Bad Nauheim. While Einstein's critics, assuming without any real justification that Einstein was behind the activities of the German press in promoting the triumph of relativity, generally avoided antisemitic attacks in their earlier publications, it later became clear to many observers that antisemitism did play a significant role in some of the attacks.
Reacting to this underlying mood, Einstein himself openly speculated in a newspaper article that in addition to insufficient knowledge of theoretical physics, antisemitism at least partly motivated their criticisms. Some critics, including Weyland, reacted angrily and claimed that such accusations of antisemitism were only made to force the critics into silence. However, subsequently Weyland, Lenard, Stark and others clearly showed their antisemitic biases by beginning to combine their criticisms with racism. For example, Theodor Fritsch emphasized the alleged negative consequences of the "Jewish spirit" within relativity physics, and the far right-press continued this propaganda unhindered. After the murder of Walther Rathenau (1922) and murder threats against Einstein, he left Berlin for some time. Gehrcke's book on The mass suggestion of relativity theory (1924) was not antisemitic itself, but it was praised by the far-right press as describing an alleged typical Jewish behavior, which was also imputed to Einstein personally. Philipp Lenard in 1922 spoke about the "foreign spirit" as the foundation of relativity, and afterward he joined the Nazi party in 1924; Johannes Stark did the same in 1930. Both were proponents of the so-called German Physics, which only accepted scientific knowledge based on experiments, and only if accessible to the senses. According to Lenard (1936), this is the "Aryan physics or physics by man of Nordic kind" as opposed to the alleged formal-dogmatic "Jewish physics". Additional antisemitic criticisms can be found in the writings of Wilhelm Müller, Bruno Thüring and others. For example, Müller erroneously claimed that relativity was a purely "Jewish affair" and it would correspond to the "Jewish essence" etc., while Thüring made comparisons between the Talmud and relativity.

=== Accusations of plagiarism and priority discussions ===
Some of Einstein's critics, like Lenard, Gehrcke and Reuterdahl, accused him of plagiarism, and questioned his priority claims to the authorship of relativity theory. The thrust of such allegations was to promote more traditional alternatives to Einstein's abstract hypothetico-deductive approach to physics, while Einstein himself was to be personally discredited. It was argued by Einstein's supporters that such personal accusations were unwarranted, since the physical content and the applicability of former theories were quite different from Einstein's theory of relativity. However, others argued that between them Poincaré and Lorentz had earlier published several of the core elements of Einstein's 1905 relativity paper, including a generalized relativity principle that was intended by Poincaré to apply to all physics. Some examples:
The historian Olivier Darrigol has enumerated similarities between the work of Einstein and of Poincaré, noting that they both worked from common sources and backgrounds and discussing why historians might adopt one or another point of view about the commonality. Another discussion concerns a possible mutual influence between Einstein and David Hilbert as regards completing the field equations of general relativity (see Relativity priority dispute).