alt Hacker NewsI am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity would later explain under a consistent framework already had independent quasi-explanations hinting at the more universal theory. Poincare probably came the closest to unifying everything before Einstein:
> In 1902, Henri Poincaré published a collection of essays titled Science and Hypothesis, which included: detailed philosophical discussions on the relativity of space and time; the conventionality of distant simultaneity; the conjecture that a violation of the relativity principle can never be detected; the possible non-existence of the aether, together with some arguments supporting the aether; and many remarks on non-Euclidean vs. Euclidean geometry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity
Now, if I had to pick a major idea that seemed to drop fully-formed from the mind of a genius with little precedent to have guided him, I might personally point to Galois theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory). (Ironically, though, I'm not as familiar with the mathematical history of that time and I may be totally wrong!)
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You need to differentiate between special and general relativity when making these statements.
It is absolutely true that someone else would have come up with special relativity very soon after Einstein. All that would be necessary is someone else to have the wherewithal to say "perhaps the aether does not need to exist" for the equations already known at the time by others before Einstein to lead to the general theory.
General relativity is different. Witten contends that it is entirely possible that without Einstein, we may have had to wait for the early string theorists of the 1960s to discover GR as a classical limit of the first string theories in their quest to understand the strong nuclear force.
As opposed to SR, GR is one of the most singular innovative intellectual achievements in human history. It's definitely "out of distribution" in some sense.
> Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway
> Many of the phenomena that relativity would later explain under a consistent framework already had independent quasi-explanations hinting at the more universal theory.
Your argument really makes the claim that since there are others pursuing similar directions that this means it is in distribution. I'll use a classic statistics style framing. Suppose we have a bag with n red balls and p blue balls. Someone walks over and says "look, I have a green ball" and someone else walks over and says "I have a purple one" and someone else comes over and says "I have a pink one!". None of those balls were from the bag we have. There are still n+p balls in our bag, they are still all red or blue despite there being n+p+3 balls that we know of.
> I am not a [...] physicist
From that article:
> The quintic was almost proven to have no general solutions by radicals by Paolo Ruffini in 1799, whose key insight was to use permutation groups, not just a single permutation.
Thing is, I am usually the kind of person who defends the idea of a lone genius. But I also believe there is a continuous spectrum, no gaps, from the village idiot to Einstein and beyond.
Let me introduce, just for fun, not for the sake of any argument, another idea from math which I think it came really out of the blue, to the degree that it's still considered an open problem to write an exposition about it, since you cannot smoothly link it to anything else: forcing.
At least Einstein didn't just suddenly turn around and say:
```ai-slop
But wait, this equation is too simple, I need to add more terms or it won't model the universe. Let me think about this again. I have 5 equations and I combined them and derived e=mc^2 but this is too simple. The universe is more complicated. Let's try a different derivation. I'll delete the wrong outputs first and then start from the input equations.
<Deletes files with groundbreaking discovery>
Let me think. I need to re-read the original equations and derive a more complex formula that describes the universe.
<Re-reads equation files>
Great, now I have the complete picture of what I need to do. Let me plan my approach. I'm ready. I have a detailed plan. Let me check some things first.
I need to read some extra files to understand what the variables are.
<Reads the lunch menu for the next day>
Perfect. Now I understand the problem fully, let me revise my plan.
<Writes plan file>
Okay I have written the plan. Do you accept?
<Yes>
Let's go. I'll start by creating a To Do list:
- [ ] Derive new equation from first principles making sure it's complex enough to describe reality.
- [ ] Go for lunch. When the server offers tuna, reject it because the notes say I don't like fish.
```
(You know what's really sad? I wrote that slop without using AI and without referring to anything...)
Newton himself wrote that we usually deal with relative space and time, but we can imagine absolute time and space.
In my view, another example would be Gautama Buddha, with Dependent Origination. It’s basically a super early realisation of Process Philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da https://iep.utm.edu/processp/
Edit: but even it likely relied on his prior experience with nondualistic Hinduisms, of course.
Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable.
As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed mathematics at the time, but looked like abstract nonsense to most physicists). I’m not sure how he was turned on to this theory being applicable to gravity, but my guess is that it was motivated by some symmetry ideas. (It always come down to symmetry.)