Investigator sites log: Poincare-Henri

Run 1, 2026-10-06 (first run; no earlier sites.md). Timed run under the 10-minute cap: web time was about 6 minutes (date +%s start 1791320067, last check 344 s). Research was done in Chrome, in its own tab, closed at the end. No logins, no CAPTCHAs, no files downloaded (research/files/ is empty).

Project basis: one document, Halsted's English translation of Poincare's "The New Mechanics" (The Monist pp. 385-395) [read]. Claims are in claims.md.

Keywords tried

• "The New Mechanics" Poincare Monist Halsted 1910
• Poincaré "La mécanique nouvelle" Lille 1909 Mercure 32"
• Poincaré Lorentz gravitation Mercury perihelion 6" "38"" 1908 de Sitter 7"
• site:henripoincarepapers.univ-lorraine.fr Halsted
• Henri Poincaré papers correspondence Halsted letters univ-lorraine
• Bucherer 1908 "Messungen an Becquerelstrahlen" Kaufmann electron mass velocity Lorentz Abraham
• "Monist" 1913 vol 23 "The New Mechanics" Poincaré archive.org OR jstor
• site:manuscripts.truman.edu Poincaré "New Mechanics" Halsted
• Within the correspondence calendar: Halsted, Kaufmann, Bucherer, Wolfskehl, Monist, Carus, Hilbert, Abraham, Langevin, Lorentz, Lille, Wacker
• Wikisource on-page: gravitation, Laplace, Mercury, perihelion

Keywords for next run (not yet tried): "Sechs Vorträge" Wolfskehl 1910 Poincaré; "Revue scientifique" 1909 "mécanique nouvelle"; "Physikalische Zeitschrift" 1910 Lorentz "Alte und neue Fragen der Physik"; Wacker Merkur Perihel 1909; Kaufmann 1906 "Konstitution des Elektrons"; Halsted Monist Poincaré translations list; "Poincaré" "Relativity of Space" Monist 1913; Poincaré 1912 "L'espace et le temps" (London lecture); Poincaré "Dernières pensées"; Max Abraham 1909 Göttingen; "Science et méthode" "La mécanique nouvelle et l'astronomie"; Le Verrier 38" Mercury per century; Newcomb 43".

Leads for review

1. The inventor's own work

• Exact identity and date of the project document (all claims): the Göttingen Wolfskehl lecture of 28 April 1909. The French was printed in Sechs Vorträge (1910) pp. 49-58; Halsted's English appeared in The Monist vol. 23 no. 3, July 1913, pp. 385-395, after Poincare's death [web: en.wikisource The_New_Mechanics_(Göttingen); JSTOR snippet; Lebon bibliography via Google]. This corrects facts.json's [memory, medium] "about 1910".
• Lille AFAS lecture, 3 August 1909, "La Mécanique nouvelle" (claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5): Poincare's own fuller version. It gives "6"" for the new mechanics' share of Mercury's 38" (leaving 32"). It names Bucherer and Kaufmann as the beta-ray experimenters. It separates the inertial mass from the attraction coefficient ("aucun moyen de décider"). It rebuts Laplace's speed-of-gravity limit. It explains the aberration-amplitude test and the self-induction analogy [web: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_M%C3%A9canique_nouvelle_(Lille)].
• "Sur la dynamique de l'électron" (Rend. Palermo 21, 1906) (claims 2, 3, 4, 5): the mathematics behind the essay. It names the "Postulate of Relativity" "without restriction" but open to test. It names the "Lorentz contraction" and credits Lorentz and FitzGerald. It needs a non-electromagnetic pressure on the electron. It proposes gravity propagating at light speed, with the effect "mainly compensated" so that it agrees with astronomy [web: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:On_the_Dynamics_of_the_Electron_(July)].
• Correspondence: Hilbert letters of Nov 1908 to Mar 1909 arrange the lectures (181.5 is HP's list of titles). HP-Lorentz letters of 1905 report "Mes résultats confirment pleinement les vôtres" [web: henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr/chp/0alphapub.html].
• Other own works on the same themes (en.wikisource author page): The Measure of Time (1898), The Theory of Lorentz and the Principle of Reaction (1900), Principles of Mathematical Physics (1904), The End of Matter (1906), The New Mechanics (Science and Method, 1908).

2. Supporting information by others

• de Sitter 1911, MNRAS 71: 388-415 (claim 5): computes Mercury's extra perihelion motion under the Poincare/Minkowski relativistic gravity law as +7".15 per century. Wacker independently got 7".2, and Lorentz quoted 6".69 in his Göttingen lectures (Phys. Z. 11, 1910). These figures are close to Poincare's "6"" and support reading the essay's 38"/32" as per century, a time unit the essay never states [web: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_bearing_of_the_Principle_of_Relativity_on_Gravitational_Astronomy].
• Bucherer 1908, Phys. Z. 9: 755-762 (claims 1, 4): beta rays at 0.32-0.69 c give a constant e/m0 under the Lorentz formula (1.695-1.706 x 10^7, corrected to 1.730). The Abraham formula drifts (1.676 to 1.578). Bucherer reads this as confirming Lorentz-Einstein. The printed discussion records Bestelmeyer's doubts (spread of velocities, differences of a few tenths of a millimetre), Bucherer's list of errors in Kaufmann's work, and Minkowski's comments [web: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Measurements_of_Becquerel_rays].
• Kaufmann's own 1906 conclusion, as reported by Bucherer, was that relativity was "disproved". The essay cites Kaufmann only for negligible "real" mass [read: p.8]. Reviewers should weigh both uses of Kaufmann's data.

3. Closely related work

• Lorentz 1900, "Considerations on Gravitation" (claim 5): the source of the velocity-dependent attraction law. Gravity is treated as the leftover of unequal attraction between opposite charges ("Franklin's hypothesis" in Poincare's Lille account). Lorentz's own Mercury result is a perihelion change of 162 x 10^-10 per revolution, which comes to about 1.4"/century (investigator's arithmetic from his factors 415 and 2.06 x 10^5). Lorentz concludes it "cannot account for the observed inequality", though he finds nothing against the formulae [web: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Considerations_on_Gravitation].
• Weber's law is mentioned by Lorentz as able "to some extent" to account for Mercury. It is a velocity-dependent force law from the same tradition (not researched).
• Abraham's rigid electron versus Lorentz's deformable electron, and Langevin's constant-volume electron (Poincare 1906): these are the rival electron models behind claims 3 and 4.

4. Historical record

• Göttingen invitation and dates documented in Hilbert-Poincare letters (Nov 1908 to Mar 1909) [web: henripoincarepapers].
• Truman State, Greenwood Papers: a Halsted offprint of "The New Mechanics", Monist reprint, catalogued "approximately 1902". This conflicts with the 1913 printing. Undecided between a cataloguer's estimate, a different Halsted translation of the same title, or a mis-title. Deciding record: the offprint's printed volume and page line [web: https://manuscripts.truman.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/16255].
• Reception in 1913: a French "Recension des revues" notice and a Dial notice ("The Late Henri Poincare") [web: Google snippets]. A modern geocentrist book ("Galileo Was Wrong") cites the essay for its relativity remark. Poincare rejected the geocentric reading himself at Lille ("je n'ai jamais eu une telle pensée").
• Translation gap: the Monist text lacks the "6"" and the Bucherer passage found in the Lille text. Whether the Göttingen French (1910) had them is unknown until Sechs Vorträge is checked.