Many discoveries and inventions would have come along sooner or later if they had not been made by the people who did them. Is this true of relativity theory or was there something special about Einstein that was unlikely to be duplicated?
Brilliant man. Right place. Right time. Standing on the shoulders of giants…
Not to take anything away from Albert, but the discovery was imminent.
Several people had already come pretty close (or more arguably, already had) formulated Special Relativity when Einstein published his results. Its actually a pretty good example of a scientific discovery that’s “time had come”. The non-existence of Einstein really wouldn’t have made much difference in the timeframe for the discovery of Special Relativity.
The special theory’s time had come, but I wouldn’t say that about the general theory. Einstein really was a genius.
I would. Formulating physics in the form of alternative geometries was “in the air” at the time, and Einstein actually got the idea from several mathematicians. And of course, Hilbert published the actual field equations at the same time Einstein did. So neither coming up with the general idea or the specific formulation was particularly unique to Einstein. It might’ve taken a few more years for someone else to do it had Einstein not existed, but I don’t think it would’ve been any longer then that.
Most of what Einstein did (the big exception being GR, as brocks mentions) was ideas whose time had come, and which, if he hadn’t done them, someone else would have. But it wouldn’t have been the same someone for each of them. For one man to have had significant impact on so many diverse areas of physics is quite remarkable, and very nearly unprecedented
However, without Einstein, our stereotype of the wild-haired mad scientist would probably never be as well-established!
So the related topic would be “No Einstein, no Doc Brown?”
I don’t know about that. I’ve heard a lot of famous physicists say that GR was a hell of a leap, and if it wasn’t for Einstein, it might have been a long time in comming
It’s been nearly 30 years since I studied SR as an undergrad, and the best explanation in the early 80s for me was an elegant prose piece called “Relativity” by a guy named Albert Einstein. And by that, I don’t mean Albert Brooks. The math was all there ready for him to use, but he understood and explained what was going on. That might have been another decade or more.
As for GR, it would have had to come next by someone who understood SR and the problems it posed. All the subtleties of GR are still being proven, frame dragging being the most recent. Einstein had a leap on everyone else being that he understood SR before anyone else, but that it only took him 10 years where it might have taken everyone else working together twice that time. He devoted nearly all his time to this and seemed to understand early on that nobody else was close on the physics of it, so much so that he promised the Nobel for it to his wife, whom he was divorcing.
Consider that in 1905 Einstein, then an unknown, published 5 papers that were all major discoveries. Any one of them might have won the Nobel Prize (was it photo-voltaic effect that did?).
The only scientist that can claim as many earth shaking changes was Newton with optics, mechanics, gravity and calculus.
It’s clear that an understanding of the physics underlying SR would have evolved in the early part of the twentieth century even if Einstein had never existed. However, would it have become common, household knowledge without Einstein’s colorful, eccentric persona associated with it? Even when I was in elementary school I knew that time slowed down if you moved really, really fast. Would I have known this, or would time dilation be an obscure fact that only college-educated adults who take calculus-based physics are exposed to?
I’ve heard it said that the acceptance of GR was initially founded on Einstein’s existing credibility. Any merits to this, or would the same publication with a different signature have received the exact same attention and acceptance?
Think you meant that.
This intrigues me. By this do you mean that the math to describe this was already the there and THE UNIVERSE JUST HAPPENED TO MATCH IT?
Seems like the arrow got turned around. Physics is just applied mathematics! :eek:
My understanding of relativity is currently limited to a layman’s level, I pretty well understand “A Brief History of the Universe”, which wasn’t much new to me as I had gotten that far reading probably Asimov’s “Understanding Physics” books as a kid.
So there is a bunch of math behind the famous formula? The popular conception is that it came to him as a concept wholly formed in it’s simplicity.
Perhaps more. I guess DaVinci wasn’t a scientist in that sense, more of an inventor, but his contribution was immense as well. Surely everyone who tried to build an airplane had a gander at his drawings, up until the Wright Brothers pulled it off. And the guy wasn’t far off! Of course neither were birds…
I think the concept is dramatic enough that if Professor Frink, as scintillating a personality as he may be, had discovered it that it still would have made headlines. The press is always looking for a good story and this is so quirky and cool that even non-geeks would find it interesting.
Certainly the first dropping of the H bomb would have made it pretty famous to the unwashed.
E = mc[sup]2[/sup], though probably Einstein’s most famous discovery, is really just something of an incidental sidenote to Special Relativity. It’s a special case of the more general equation E[sup]2[/sup] = m[sup]2[/sup]c[sup]4[/sup] + p[sup]2[/sup]c[sup]2[/sup] for the case of zero momentum, and that equation in turn is just a particular application of the norm of a four-vector in Lorentzian spacetime. And for that matter, four-vectors are just one of the simpler cases of the tensors in which relativity is expressed. The famous equation is just the metaphorical toe of the elephant.
I think what The Second Stone meant was that certain equations that Einstein used had been written down by other scientists before 1905, most notably Poincaré and Lorentz. Wikipedia actually has a list of who postulated what when. Einstein usually gets the credit for special relativity not because the equations were novel — in fact, Lorentz had written them down the year before — but because he was the first one to realize and truly accept that the ether wasn’t necessary. Lorentz & Poincaré’s papers before 1905 tended to treat time dilation and length contraction as, essentially, elaborate optical illusions; they still believed that there was a “true” length and a “true” time as would be measured in the ether’s rest frame.
Maybe, but note that in your wikipedia link, Poincare was already speculating that the aether was unnecessary in 1899, though he apparently continued to formulate his theories in terms of it.
I think Einsteins reputation as the inventor of Special Relativity has more to do with his putting a lucid explanation of it in a single paper, rather then his having originated any particular idea. Had Poincare been more of a “Issac Newton type” and more energetically defended his priority, we’d consider him the inventor of Special Relativity today.
Yes, I meant Poincare and Lorentz’s equations. And yes, I make zee leetle joke about the comedian.
I think special relativty was immenient, infact all Eistein really did was take ideas that already existed and just express them in a more formal axiomatic way, much like Von Neumann did with Quantum Mechanics.
Though one thing Einstein is responsible for is formulating the the ‘mass-energy equivalece relation’ i.e. E = mc^2. The actual arguments to derive this equation from the postulates of relativty aren’t obvious and so the discovery of that particular relationship may’ve been delayed a few years without Einstein.
General relatvity is really is really Eisntein’s ‘masterpiece’, it would be very difficult top say if and when that particualr theory would of come without Einstein. I’m sure someone would’ve come up with a broadly simalir theory without Einsetin, though their may well have been some qualitive and quantitive differences. What a lot of people aren’t aware of is taht there’s a broad class of simlair theories to general relatvity that equally fit the experimental evidence as general relatvity’s higher order predictions have hardly been tested.