He made it up

Originally posted by MrMartin
Einstein wasn't as big a genius as most people think. He did have a curious mind, however, and he wasn't afraid to think differently than other people around him believed.

But that is the difference between your middle-of-the-road Genius and your top-notch Gaussian-level genius!

Originally posted by FabianFnas
Yes, of course, I'm speculating. I'm not rewriting the history.
There are many great progresses made at the same time during the history. The E=mc2 wouldn't be the only one.
Einstein was not the only one having tha mind of his calibre. A few years later the famous formula would have been there anyway. Perhaps not in the exact form of E=mc2, but still with the same idea.

Is there any single individual without whom some particular knowledge could not have been acquired? Of course not, so your comments are nonsensical. Einstein was the one who did it, so credit to him.

And for the record, no one here has hailed Einstein as the greatest genius of all time, so I'm not sure what you're arguing against when you saying that he wasn't the only one with a mind of "his calibre".

Originally posted by twhitehead
I disagree. Genius' may be better at deducing things and faster at learning etc but that does not mean that you or I are incapable of it.

I think we just mean different things by the word ‘genius’ -fair enough.

Originally posted by Palynka
I see your crystal ball is still in working order. Rewriting history is pointless and an exercise in faith.

Einstein wasn’t the only genius. If Einstein died at age two then, given enough time, what would have stopped another genius from deducing relativity? After all, the theory of relativity was created through reasoning as opposed to through random chance -it would have been only a matter of time before one of those geniuses would hit upon the same line of reasoning.

Originally posted by MrMartin
Einstein wasn't as big a genius as most people think. He did have a curious mind, however, and he wasn't afraid to think differently than other people around him believed.

Around the time Einstein became interested in physics (1895), electricity, magnetism, and the phenomenon of light were all under intensive study. A number of scientific theories and m gnificant and no one really paid much attention to them.

No one, except Einstein, that is.

….Einstein wasn't as big a genius as most people think.
..…

Let me just ask you just this one question -would you have ever both deduced relativity and worked out all that mathematics if you were alive and researching physics back then?

Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
Einstein wasn’t the only genius. If Einstein died at age two then, given enough time, what would have stopped another genius from deducing relativity? After all, the theory of relativity was created through reasoning as opposed through random chance.

My point is that this is true of anyone, from Newton to Darwin or Archimedes. There is no knowledge that could only be found by one particular historical figure, so to deny Einstein genius status on those grounds is denying that the word genius can ever be applied.

So, instead of revising history, let's praise the man who eventually did deduce it.

Originally posted by Palynka
So, instead of revising history, let's praise the man who eventually did deduce it.

Let us also not keep thinking that E=mc^2 was all that Einstein ever did. He did many many other things and is responsible for a lot of scientific advances and ideas.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
If Einstein wasn't around, then someone else would have done it not much later. Einstein wasn't the only genious one back then.

Having given this some thought, I disagree. I believe Riemann is an example of someone who discovered much, but did not publish it. In fact, due to his papers being burned after his death by his housekeeper, many important discoveries were lost until relatively recently (I believe "The Music of the Primes, by du Sautoy gives the story). Another example would be Fermat, who died in 1665 and many of whose elementary (aka didn't require 20th century maths) results were not proven until Euler came along (born: 1707).

EDIT: On the other hand, these discoveries, especially Riemann's, were ahead of their time and were only really solved when they "came of age" - when people needed the solutions. Einstein's, I believe, came along at the appropriate time, when they were needed. Necessity drives invention...and, perhaps, discoveries?

Originally posted by Swlabr
Having given this some thought, I disagree. I believe Riemann is an example of someone who discovered much, but did not publish it. In fact, due to his papers being burned after his death by his housekeeper, many important discoveries were lost until relatively recently (I believe "The Music of the Primes, by du Sautoy gives the story). Another example would ...[text shortened]... riate time, when they were needed. Necessity drives invention...and, perhaps, discoveries?

The examples of Riemann and Fermat (and Newton) shows that I might be wrong. But, as you say, they were ahead of their time, and further rather alone in their respective fields.

Einstein wasn't alone, 'lots' of brilliant minds were thinking in the same lines as Einstein. I think his discoveries were to come, with or without Einstein.

"Don't use condoms, you'll never know if you prevent another Einstein to be born." - an old chinese saying that I just invented.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
The examples of Riemann and Fermat (and Newton) shows that I might be wrong. But, as you say, they were ahead of their time, and further rather alone in their respective fields.

Einstein wasn't alone, 'lots' of brilliant minds were thinking in the same lines as Einstein. I think his discoveries were to come, with or without Einstein.

"Don't use cond ...[text shortened]... f you prevent another Einstein to be born." - an old chinese saying that I just invented.

I would have thought Newton was an example for your argument, not against. He "invented" (or whatever) the calculus quite a few years before Liebniz, although he did not publish his findings until after Liebniz. Essentially, both men performed the same work as close to simultaneously as you could wish.

Similarly, it was either Cauchy or Gauss that rarely published, and subsequently when someone else published something they would say "Ah! I proved that x years ago, look here! It's elementary!". I have a feeling it was Cauchy, because he wasn't exactly what you would call a nice man, while Gauss didn't publish his work on non-Euclidean geometry as he didn't want to cause offence.

Originally posted by Swlabr
I would have thought Newton was an example for your argument, not against. He "invented" (or whatever) the calculus quite a few years before Liebniz, although he did not publish his findings until after Liebniz. Essentially, both men performed the same work as close to simultaneously as you could wish.

Similarly, it was either Cauchy or Gauss that r ss didn't publish his work on non-Euclidean geometry as he didn't want to cause offence.

Newton kept his findings in cometary orbits for decades until he revealed them to Edmend Halley. That's what I thought of.

Even Darwin hold his findings about evolution, until someone else (who?) was about to publish his findings.

I think (I might be wrong) that Poincarré was the one in the vierge to show his solutions before Einstein. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%#Poincar.C3.A9_and_Einstein)

Originally posted by FabianFnas
I think (I might be wrong) that Poincarré was the one in the vierge to show his solutions before Einstein. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%#Poincar.C3.A9_and_Einstein)

Yes Poincaré was the who was closest to what Einstein achieved. He also was the one (actually one of the ones) who arrived at the E=mc^2 equation. But to Poincaré it was just: "light behaves as if it was a fluid with mass E/c^2" Einstein's derivation of E=mc^2 was more general than that and he correctly understood that that equation could be applied to all forms of matter and energy.

The history of special relativity is very tortuous and it has a lot of unsung heroes.

Originally posted by Palynka
Ah, ok. So, in your opinion, Einstein expected invariance and therefore that assumption almost comes out as a result (so to speak, if it's a necessary condition). Is this correct? Interesting.

What Einstein hold most dear to him was Maxwell's equations. By Maxwell's equations one can predict tha the value of the speed of the electromagnetic waves (what we normally call light being just a special case of an electromagnetic wave) is constant. Now in the context of late 19th early 20 th century physics this result couldn't hold because wave motion always had a velocity dependent of the frame where it was being measured. So physicists postulated the existence of the aether as the medium where light had a constant value for its speed. Now this aether had a lot of conceptual difficulties since it had to have some contradictory properties. Besides that experimental evidence of the existence of aether was never found and people just gave (what now seems) the most ludicrous explanations for that. Truth be told that some of those explanations weren't that bad. Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz formulated the concept of local time which is close the right concept of proper time; but while this concepts had the right mathematical expressions (by this I mean that the formulas one arrives with Einstein's reasoning are the same as the former) they have the wrong physical basis.

Poincaré also did a lot for relativity in its proto-form and what's more he arrived at almost the same conceptions than Einstein but it couldn't just give the last step (if ypu curious about it "Einstein's clocks and Poincaré's maps" is a very nice book about this). What is clear to everybody is that Special Relativity would be found at most in the next10 years and there really was a lot of people that were able to do that (they just had to extend the work of Poincaré for instance, and remember that Poincaré was just inches away of the full story) but General relativity was Einstein's great job. It is one of those things in the history of human intellect that really makes one think that only the guy that make it could make it. If you ask me this truly marks the great genius that Einstein had. I have lots of respect for him just for the fact that he gave th right physical interpretation to the strange phenomena that occur in special relativity, but General Relativity is a work of art that only a superior mind could achieve.

As for the constancy of the speed of light: well we already had Maxwell's equations predicting it and no experimental evidence could disprove it. So Einstein took this fact as an axiom and together with the axiom that the laws of physics have the same form in all inertial frames he could arrive at the right theory of special relativity.

So the constancy of the speed of light never comes as a result it is one of the building blocks of the theory. What comes as a result is the fact that if a body starts moving at a speed lower than the speed of light it will always move with a speed lower than the speed of light. Sometimes we read (even in technical books) and hear that in special relativity it is assumed that the speed of light is a limit speed in the Universe, according to special relativity, but that is false.