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]

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".)

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.