Einstein's Originality Debate
The cluster discusses whether Einstein's theories, particularly relativity, were groundbreaking original work or primarily syntheses of prior experimental results and ideas from physicists like Lorentz, Poincaré, and others.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
Einstein failed experimental physics (src: Isaacson's bio)
Einstein would have agreed with you
Einstein "physical intuition" is just an euphemism for lack of references and citations in papers of Einstein.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute
Yes. It seems that folks forget that Einstein didn't invent all this things.
Many papers/authors postulating something different to what Einstein did?
It is in the ballpark. The point is that Einstein did not pull a rabbit out of his hat, others had thought similar weirdness, and Einstein was aware of it.
Einstein would apparently disagree with you.
Read newton and einsteins famous papers and it'll bother you less
It's not false, w.r.t. general relativityAnd you still need a good amount of creativity to come up with special relativity and to a certain extent, with the photoelectric effect (though we could say that was the 'easy' one)But yes, the puzzling results and existing mathematics were part of it. But there is a reason we hear much more about Einstein than Lorenz or Michelson-Moreley
Einstein's theories were based on existing experimental results. In fact for Special Relativity he merely stated what must be true for the Michaelson-Morley experiment to fail to show any speed difference with respect to the ether.Lorentz and other physicists had already derived a set of equations(called Lorentz transformations) that must be true given the experimental failure. But they considered it unthinkable that the speed of light could be constant in all inertial reference frames,