Publisher's Synopsis
The true story of how Albert Einstein and his friends manipulated credit for Ludwig Lange's theory of the inertial system and literally drove him mad culminating in his death in an insane asylum. Lange and Einstein not only clashed over the issue of plagiarism, but on a number of political issues as well. Einstein hated Germans and wanted to see the nation of Germany divided and ruined. Lange was a patriotic German who publicly opposed moral and political relativism and sought to protect Germans from internationalism and communism. Numerous noteworthy scientists sought to give Lange his due credit for his innovations, which were fundamental to the special theory of relativity. Albert Einstein and Max von Laue colluded with the press to smear these men with racist accusations as a means of distracting the public from their honest charges that Einstein was a career plagiarist and a self-promoting fraud. In 1885, the young mathematician and physicist Gustav Ludwig Lange published a remarkable new theory, which presented a novel method for mapping uniform, rectilinear motion of translation. He called these reference systems "inertial systems". Lange firmly believed in his theory and patiently waited until his death for the scientific community to recognize his unique contributions to science. Instead of acknowledging Lange's priority for this fundamental element of the special theory of relativity, and despite Lange's public plea for recognition, Albert Einstein and his friends ridiculed Ludwig Lange and took credit for his revolutionary ideas and nomenclature. Ludwig Lange died in a mental hospital suffering from severe depression brought on by Einstein's plagiarism of his work. All of Ludwig Lange's papers on the inertial system are republished, as is his scarce article "Mein Verhältnis zu Einstein's Weltbild" (My Relationship to Einstein's Conception of the Universe) in which Lange details the facts exposing how he and Ernst Mach were being deliberately written out of the history of relativity theory. The book provides a complete history, including extremely rare booklets and newspaper and journal articles from the period, of Albert Einstein, Max von Laue and Einstein friends' dishonest, racist and hypocritical smear campaigns against Ludwig Lange, Ernst Gehrcke, Philipp Lenard and Paul Weyland.
