I can still remember the chanting now…
Oct-A-Gon!
Oct-A-Gon!
Yeah, those were the days.
If Einstein was never born, Cecil Adams would have just figured all that stuff out anyway. We would have had to wait thirty years longer but it would still have happend.
Chronos: I am only a humble master’s student in physics, with an eye toward astronomy for my PhD. So I have some experience with special relativity, and have read most of the university’s available books on general relativity. I would not consider myself a bona fide expert, just an interested student, so feel free to overrule me at any time =)
Also, although Newtonian mechanics does predict approximately mass-independent orbits for massive bodies, I’m not sure that those orbits were logically extended to light, if only because light went from being thought of as a pure wave effect (through 1900) to being considered a massless particle (and thus immune to Newtonian gravitation). Were there any attempts made before 1918 to detect the deflection of light by gravity?
Why are you people so worried about what might have happened if Einstein was never born?
You should be worried about von Schmelling, who might have been the world’s greatest physicist, but was never born.