Olinto De Pretto
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Olinto De Pretto (1857 - 1921) was an Italian industrialist from Schio, Vicenza.
In 1903 De Pretto published a paper titled "Ipotesi dell’etere nella vita dell’universo" ("Hypothesis of Aether in the Life of the Universe"), in which he proposed that matter moving at the speed of light would have kinetic energy equal to mc2, based on his (erroneous) belief that mv2 represented the kinetic energy of a body moving at the speed v. From this he speculated that, if the particles of ordinary matter are moving at the speed c, they would possess this much energy. De Pretto's paper was later included in the proceedings ("Atti") of the Italian scientific institute "Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti" (The Royal Veneto Institute of Science, Letters and Arts), accepted November 23, 1903 and printed February 27, 1904 (Tomo LXIII, Parte II, pp. 439-500). According to de Pretto:
"the matter of any body contains in it a sum of energy represented by the entire mass of the body[... ] Nobody will easily admit that, stored in a latent state, in any kilogram of matter, completely hidden to all our investigations, hides such a sum of energy, equivalent to the amount that can be extracted from millions and millions of kilograms of coal."
This estimate of the energy content of mass is not quantitatively consistent with the expression mc2, even if it is interpreted as "a million million kilograms". Also, de Pretto's line of reasoning is not regarded as scientifically meaningful by the mainstream scientific community. Furthermore, the idea of a relationship between mass and energy was not a novel one at the time de Pretto wrote, since it was already to be found in the works of Maxwell, Poincare, and others. Nevertheless, some opponents of Einstein's theory of relativity have argued that de Pretto should be credited as the originator of the idea of equivalence between mass and energy. In particular, Umberto Bartocci, a University of Perugia historian of mathematics and ardent opponent of Einstein's theory of relativity, has attempted to popularize this view.
Bartocci argues [1] that Einstein, who was fluent in Italian, may have learned of the equivalence of mass and energy from his friend Michele Besso, who (Bartocci suggests) may have been personally acquainted with Olinto De Pretto. However, it is clear that de Pretto did not derive the equation using the theory of relativity, and his use of the equation bears no relation to Einstein's [2]. On the other hand, it is well known that some relations between mass and energy was anticipated by several other physicists, such as Henri Poincaré (1900) and Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1904), although not attaching to it the same implication of equivalence of mass and energy.
- Further information: Mass–energy equivalence#History
