Albert Einstein is not guilty: he did not pinch the theory of general relativity from someone else and present it as all his own work. A scientific investigation published Friday finally clears him of plagiarism.
Four years ago, a biography, "The Private Lives of Albert Einstein" by Roger Highfield and Paul Carter effectively cleared him of stealing special relativity from the then-Mrs. Einstein, Mileva, a fellow physics student. Einstein's reputation for warmth, not to say soppiness, rose with the discovery of some disarmingly gushing love letters to Mileva.In January a scientific sleuth revealed that the genius of modern physics had a second career designing and patenting refrigerators in partnership with his Hungarian colleague, Leo Szilard, the father of the atomic bomb.
And last week astrophysicists finally confirmed one of Einstein's great predictions: that dense neutron stars and massive black holes would "drag" space and time around with them as they spun.
But the great general relativity rip-off rumor has bubbled away since 1915. Einstein had dropped out of high school and was a clerk in a patent office when he proposed the theory - the one about the funny things that would happen to anyone accelerating away at the speed of light.
But he was not the only person working on the theory. Historians have always believed that German mathematician David Hilbert discovered the correct equations for general relativity before Einstein. Hilbert never claimed priority, but this still left open the possibility that Einstein might have copied crucial equations.
And it created yet another cloud over the reputation within Germany of a Jewish genius who was to be the victim of Nazi vilification. Einstein left his wife, and Europe, and settled in Princeton, N.J. His reputation was safe outside his own country: The first proof of general relativity was demonstrated by British astronomers in 1919.
A team from Tel Aviv University, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and Boston University is producing the final judgment Friday in the journal Science. Einstein had been working on the theory since 1907. Hilbert only began work on general relativity half way through 1915, they say. There were explicit equations missing from printer's proofs of Hilbert's theory, dated December 1915 - after Einstein had submitted the real thing.
So Hilbert's equations must have been inserted later, the team reports. It might have guessed.
One of Einstein's letters dated 1915 describes a lecture on general relativity made before either of them published. In it, he said: "To my great joy, I completely succeeded in convincing Hilbert."