An unusual ‘jewish invention’ is the claim by Slava Bazarsky that jews invented the quantum theory of gravity and credits a Soviet jewish physicist named Matvei Bronstein – no relation of Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) – with it writing:
‘Matvey Bronstein - a quantum theory of gravity’ (1)
This is complete nonsense as there is no generally accepted let alone settled quantum theory of gravity as of yet with the two main candidate theories being String Theory and the Loop Quantum Gravity Theory. Thus, we cannot say there is one person responsible for it as yet and when this does happen then we can be sure it will Nobel Prizes all round, but it hasn’t happened yet.
In addition, Bazarsky has his timeline completely wrong since Bronstein was not the first to attempt to produce a quantum theory of gravity, which was first speculated to be required by Albert Einstein in 1916 (2) and the first unsuccessful attempt to provide one was done by Bronstein’s - as well as to a lesser extent Einstein’s – fellow jewish Bolshevik Leon Rosenfeld – who was from Belgium - in 1930. (3)
Bronstein similar unsuccessful efforts come after Rosenfeld’s with Stanley Deser explains at length just before his recent death:
‘The two works are by Bronstein (also Trotsky's real name) in the USSR and by Fierz and Pauli in Switzerland. Pauli had a headstart: As a wunderkind aged 18, he wrote the first text on GR! Sadly, Bronstein who was also a wunderkind, was an early victim of Stalin's purges. Their quantization was a straightforward extension of that of electrodynamics, the other abelian gauge theory. All authors understood that this was far from a true QG, but at least it was its first glimmer, and indeed a long time—about 25 years—also passed until the next meaningful steps were taken. Remember that the idea of quantizing spacetime is conceptually vastly removed from that of ordinary matter systems, namely, fermions and photons.’ (4)
What Deser is explaining here is that Bronstein, Fierz and Pauli – only Markus Fierz was not jewish in this trio – all failed to produce a working theory of the quantum theory of gravity, and we had to wait till the 1960s till we begin to have the beginnings of viable theories which largely became String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity Theory (although there are more than a dozen other less popular and viable alternatives to these two) which are the main modern candidate theories. (5)
He then goes on to explain that we haven’t solved the quantum theory of gravity issue as of yet but does explain that the man who – more than any other – has contributed fundamentally to modern physics being on the right track (or rather working in the right frame) is Werner Heisenberg (Roger Penrose has also made outsized contributions to this but Deser doesn’t mention this role as it came later).
Deser explains that:
‘This brings us to about 1960, when the reformulation of GR as a (rather unusual) field theory was successfully undertaken by Arnowitt, myself, and Misner (ADM)3 and similarly, if less completely, by Dirac. Unlike theirs, most other GR work of the time involved its original classical geometrical form. I should also mention deWitt's lifetime devotion to this problem. There was a separate interlude in the mid-fifties when several people (Klein, Landau, Pauli, and I) independently suggested that QG might be a universal regulator for the infinities then ravaging matter loop calculations, but nothing came of it. My foolhardy attempt was the only published one, at the first conference devoted to GR at Chapel Hill, in 1957, where it was rapidly shot down by Feynman. [There seems also to have been a small meeting at the Bohr Institute in Summer 1957, at which I was apparently present, but of which I have no recollections whatever!]
Quite separately from this line is the lesson Heisenberg drew from Fermi's weak interaction model which, unlike quantum electrodynamics, had a dimensional coupling constant. He noted that any theory of this type would be beset by infinities of rising virulence with each perturbative order. This rapidly understood, if tacitly, insight applied to GR with Newton's constant and cast a complete pall on QG. What Heisenberg told us was that perturbative (and there is no other known way) QG was guaranteed to lose all predictive power as soon as one left its classical, tree, level. On the other hand, GR's quantization is mandated because Einstein's equations have matter as the source of gravity, so consistency requires it. (I mercifully do not cite some feeble attempts to circumvent this by making the matter source be some sort of expectation value of its quantum nature.) Even absent matter, GR must be quantized to avoid the ultraviolet catastrophe. But the motivation to continue any QG program was greatly diminished. Still, ADM and soon after, Schwinger separately completed the formal quantization program. That is about the end of the prehistory, since there was little incentive to proceed further on this purely formal program, though one might add the decade later verifications of Heisenberg's predictions by explicit calculations of one-loop plus matter QG corrections, then still later, the two-loop ones of pure QG. A minor spinoff is the derivation of Classical GR using QM methods.’ (6)
The key point here is in truth there isn’t someone we can credit as yet with the theory of quantum gravity, but we can say that – based on Deser’s words and expertise as being a major figure in the field for circa four decades before his recent death – the person we should currently credit as having contributed more substantially than any other is Werner Heisenberg not the largely unimportant Matvei Bronstein.
References
(1) https://slavaguide.com/en/blog/jewish-inventors-and-jewish-inventions
(2) Alessio Rocci, 2013, ‘On first attempts to reconcile quantum principles with gravity’, Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Vol. 470, a. 012004
(3) Idem.
(4) Stanley Deser, 2022, ‘A short pre-history of quantum gravity’, American Journal of Physics, Vol. 90, No. 4, p. 249
(5) Ibid., p. 250
(6) Ibid., pp. 249-250