Question by : Would a scientist have discovered the Theory of Relativity by now if Einstein hadn’t done it?
Was Einstein a unique talent ? Or was he just the first one out of many working on relativity who happened to release his findings first?
Best answer:
Answer by Lola F
He wasn’t even the first one to work on it or release his findings. The stage was set for relativity the moment Maxwell wrote down his equations. Einstein is responsible for exactly none of the mechanism of Special Relativity— only its interpretation. All the theory had already been worked out by Lorentz and Poincaré.
Einstein IS responsible for the theory of General Relativity, but even that would have been formulated at his time or shortly after, as soon as anyone attempted to make Newton’s gravity Lorentz covariant (that is, logically consistent with Special Relativity).
Einstein was a smart dude, but he wasn’t superhuman, or a god.
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Just about all scientific discoveries are dependent on past discoveries. Yes, there would have been someone else along with the same theories, but it could have been 20 or 50 years later. Or 1 year later. Who can say?
The principle of relativity was first postulated by Galileo in the 1600′s and then worked on by Newton in his work on mechanics and then Einstein put forward his works of General and special relativity. His General theory was mainly built from Newtons work on gravity and quite modern (at the time) applications of non-euclidean geometry. His special theory was built upon the foundation laid by Galileo and contained more modern influences such as work by Planck and others.
Einstein was a very unique thinker but like all good science his works were built upon the shoulders of giants.
Yes.
As long as the riddle of the constant speed of light no matter what lay unanswered someone or group of someones would be out there looking for the answer to that riddle. AE was just the first to publish the answer…space and time adapted to keep C at C no matter what.
Remember Maxwell with his equations and Michelson-Morley with their experiment had already laid the ground work by pointing out the riddle…how can the speed of light be C no matter what the source or observer are or what they are doing?
Conceptually, how can W = U + C = C; where U is the speed of the source, C is the speed of light at the source, and W is the relative speed at the observer.
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