In September 1904, Henri Poincaré delivered a lecture at the International Congress of Arts and Science in Saint Louis. He articulated the principle of relativity in explicit and general terms — not as a rule specific to electrodynamics, but as a foundational constraint for mathematical physics. The idea was in the air. How it reached the ground depended on the channels.
Giacomini (arXiv:2603.23410) traces three publication paths. First: La Revue des idées in November 1904, a commercially run interdisciplinary journal. This placed the lecture where non-specialists could encounter it. Second: the Bulletin des sciences mathématiques in December 1904, which routed it into established mathematical networks. Third: an English translation in The Monist in January 1905, extending it across the Atlantic into philosophical and scientific discourse.
Three channels, three audiences, three timelines — all from the same lecture. The mathematical community saw it through one lens, the broader intellectual public through another, the English-speaking world through a third. Each channel selected for different aspects of the argument. The mathematical bulletin emphasized formal structure. The interdisciplinary review emphasized conceptual sweep. The philosophical journal emphasized epistemological implications.
The structural point is that dissemination is not passive diffusion. A scientific idea doesn't spread uniformly from its source. It enters specific institutional pathways that shape which aspects survive, which audiences receive it, and what it means by the time it arrives. The same idea, arriving through different channels, is not quite the same idea. The medium doesn't just carry the message — it selects which parts of the message are legible.