John Carlos Baez on Nostr: - I recommend the first few pages of Harvey Brown's "Poincaré and Special ...

- I recommend the first few pages of Harvey Brown's "Poincaré and Special Relativity", which examines how Poincaré's transformations are defined only relative to the aether rest frame:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.3175

A quote:

"Yet Poincare’s theories remain tied to the notion of a a privileged frame of
reference; for instance, in his 1906 paper ‘On the Dynamics of an Electron,’ he
gives an analysis of the motion of an electron in which he continues to refer to
the ‘real electron,’ meaning the electron as it appears to observers in the ether
rest frame. Whatever Poincare might believe in the context of philosophy, in
the context of his scientific work he assumes that at least some of the actual
laws of nature are distinct from the laws formulated by observers. In this case,
the actual laws of nature, which single out a privileged rest frame, conspire to
produce the same observable effects in all inertial reference frames so that all observers in such reference frames will formulate the same laws on the basis
of their observations."