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Relativity "In The Air'?
Someone claimed that relativity was "in the air" and if Einstein had
not discovered it then someone else would have. This is quite likely for Special Relativity, given that Poincare, Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and others were hot on the trail. Poincare had most of the pieces of the puzzle worked out, but never put them together in a succinct and coherent way. General Relativity was a different matter. GR was definitely not "in the air". Planck, a strong supporter of Einstein, told AE that his new ideas about gravitation "were almost certainly wrong, and even if they are right no one will believe you". [Mod. note: again, please try to stay on topic for the newsgroup -- mjh] |
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Relativity "In The Air'?
In article , "Robert L.
Oldershaw" writes: Someone That was I. claimed that relativity was "in the air" and if Einstein had not discovered it then someone else would have. This is quite likely for Special Relativity, Here is the exact quote: "(Special) relativity was "in the air" and would have been found eventually by someone else if Einstein hadn't." General Relativity was a different matter. Indeed. GR was definitely not "in the air". No-one claimed it was. See the DIRECT QUOTE above. I was talking about special relativity. I even wrote "Special". (It was in parentheses because the discussion was about "relativity" and the allegedly long time between discovery and Nobel Prize. GR came out in 1915, had 1 postdiction and one confirmed prediction (though with big error bars) by 1919, surely too early for recognition in 1921. So, it was obvious from the context that SR was meant. Nevertheless, I explicitly wrote "Special" so that no-one could claim I said GR was "in the air".) |
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Relativity "In The Air'?
On Tuesday, October 7, 2014 3:09:24 AM UTC-4, Robert L. Oldershaw wrote:
Someone claimed that relativity was "in the air" and if Einstein had not discovered it then someone else would have. This is quite likely for Special Relativity, given that Poincare, Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and others were hot on the trail. If I can continue this off-topic thread for a bit longer... One of my most memorable experiences as a student was attending a lecture by Paul Dirac. Dirac held a contrarian view - that the special and not the general theory of relativity was Einstein's greatest achievement (and one of the greatest in the history of science). He said that while Poincare' and others were close to finding the right equations, they weren't close to revolutionizing our understanding of space-time. Einstein's approach of throwing out the ether and deriving the equations from a minimal set of postulates was quite different from that of his contemporaries, and set an example for the rest of 20th century theoretical physics to follow. |
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