Let me be clear about one thing up front: Albert Einstein’s conception of Relativity is one of the - if not THE - greatest cognitive leaps made by an individual in the history of mankind. He’s The Man - just so we’re clear.
However, taken another way, wasn’t it just another nifty little thought experiment that happen to take off like a runaway train? How many times have folks had little mind games like “hmm, what if humans relied more on smell vs. sight?” or “what if people could carry their music with them?” At its absolute simplest (which is about all I am capable of), the theory of relativity conjectures “what if the stuff we thought was constant and objectively measurable - things like time and speed - were, in fact, variable based on perspective; and something we thought was relative (i.e., we could approach it ourselves) - the speed of light - was in fact a constant? Wow - what a world operating under those rules be like?”
See what I’m saying? It was a nifty, unorthodox idea, but no less whacky that imagining what life would be like if our knees bent the other way. I can imagine a bunch of Viennese college students, stoned saying “Herr Dude - what if light was a constant, Dude!” - it just so happened that Einstein not only came up with the thought experiment, but realized that it might, in fact, apply to reality and he had the basic math, physics and other skills to play it out in all its glory.
I just read a biography of the Beatles - these guys love U.S. rock and roll, but were brought up in the British pop tradition and wanted to write their own songs. To them, the “toppermost of the poppermost” (their stated goal) was getting a single recorded. The fact that their formula translated into redefining music as we know it in the world is a fantastic story that far outstretched their original vision for themselves - the fact that they could ride that wave (and not go crazy!) for long enough to endure is a testament to their transcendant talent.
Is that true of Einstein, too? Could he have a been smart guy makin’ stuff up while at the patent office, seized upon something HUGE and just rode that wave? And the fact that he could ride the wave is that much more evidence that he had transcendant talent? I know in 1905 he also published on Brownian motion and, I think optics, so he was clearly a wide and varying brilliance - but that might be all the more evidence that he was just thinkin’ stuff up - the fact that Relativity is what blew things open is almost serendipity. ???
Sorry for the long post - am I making any sense here???
You’re asking if, rather than it being an incredibly complicated and densely detailed concept, his core idea was a simple one that changed one main parameter of how one views things, and as a consequence of that one change a whole lot of other things clicked into place?
Now that the question has been answered by scientists, I would just like to say that the most wonderful thing for me about Special Relativity is that it was entirely deduced by first order predicate logic. It begins with two premises: (1) the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, and (2) physical law is everywhere the same. It is the counter-example that I always give against the argument that deduction cannot yield new knowledge.
True, but Einstein is unfairly credited with sole responsibilty (in the popular consciousness, at least), whereas I daresay mathematicians who’ve studied the history would argue that David Hilbert and his students materially aided in the development and should be credited again for the formalism. GR is really an extension of SR onto a topologically curved space. In any case, Einstein’s work capped off about thirty years of anxiety, alternate theorizing, and argumentation about the obviously flawed notion of an objective spacetime plenum. He tied things together, but the individual components were all out there in the community.
Although Maxwell never formalized his eponymous equations in the form they’re seen today (you can thank Oliver Heaviside for that), he certainly is the father of electrodynamics, and as great an influence on pre-modern physics as Newton. He also made signficant and fundamental contributions to the fields of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, including his famous thought experiment regarding the 2nd Law of Thermo, Maxwell’s Demon.
I’m not sure what strawman you’re arguing against, but virtually any system of algebra (in the general, grammatical sense) sufficient to represent the behavior of real-world systems can be used to deduce an indefinite number of propositions (and suggest, but not prove, an infinite number) which extend beyond the axioms of that system. It is sometimes said that “deductive inference renders conclusions of no greater generality than the premises” but that isn’t a very meaningful statement in the general context of knowledge.
When we learned how to use highschool algebra to deduce E = mc^2 from the constancy of light, and appreciated how he let go of our unspoken assumptions about time, I had to fall in love with him.
Usually, it takes a form similar to this: “The truth is that new knowledge is not a product of logic but is learned from the world about singular phenomena and is generalized through induction.” (Example.) It seems to be either a blind obedience to Kant’s universality of a priori truths (which ignores perceptions that vary), or a misunderstanding of Russell’s descriptions of how all inductions are deduced. I’ve even seen Russell cited as supporting the idea, which is bizarre, since he said that deductive logic “refutes both empiricism and idealism” and that “human knowledge is not wholly deduced from facts of sense”. (The Philosophical Importance of Mathematical Logic)
FWIW, I feel sure that someone would have come up with special relativity very soon after. In fact, people had been nibbling around the edges for at least a decade. Einstein was the first to say, “This is reality”.
General relativity is a completely different matter. It is not obvious that even today any other physicist would have formulated it. That was a magnificant tour de force.
It is not well known that Hilbert published the equations of general relativity five days before Einstein. But Hilbert gets no credit and rightly so because he did so only after intense conversation with Einstein and he derived them from symmetry principles rather than physics. He got the ideas from Einstein who had the ideas but whose first attempt at equations didn’t come out right.
I heard a lecture from a physicist titled, “Was Einstein right?” that included the fact that the GPS satellites would drift, IIRC, 10km per day had they not included correction for the clocks running more slowly on earth owing to the slightly higher gravitational field down here. Can anyone confirm that figure? That makes it the best verification of the equations of general relativity we have to date.
I’ve always wondered, Einstein got a Nobel Prize for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, not for what he did with Relativity. Was his work with relativity not considered worthy back in his day? Or where all the other projects in physics truly more worthy of the prize than relativity was?
By the same token, it’s unlikely that Einstein would have developed the field equations without Hilbert’s work. According to Kip Thorne Hilbert regarded GR as being Einstein’s baby, but I think credit is due to both.
This is an interesting question to which I don’t think that there is a definitive answer. The ostensible reason is that Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect was experimentially verifiable (and in fact it resolved existing problems that were previously unexplained) while relativity had only very tenative empirical support and was still being contested by some old hands. It has been suggested that Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić may have contributed significantly or even primarily to the development of special relativity; certainly, she was privy to his early development of the Annus Mirabilis Papers. She was given a significant settlement as well as a major chunck of Einstein’s Nobel Prize money as part of the divorce agreement. Lacking any hard documentation like notes or future development (Maric went on to purchase an apartment building and raise her family, never making any significant contributions to physics in her own name) this is an entirely speculative claim.
It is somewhat ironic that Einstein won the Nobel for his work on the photoelectric effect insofar as his own difficulties accepting the implications of quantum mechanics and the lack (even today) of it coinciding nicely with relativity, the field for which Einstein is primarily known by the general public.
