If Einstein did not discover Theory of Relativity in 1905, how many years did it take others to discover?

Question

It is generally misunderstood by general public that if Einstein didn't exist, there is no Theory of Relativity. But it's not true. Other great physicist like Niels Bohr surely would have discovered it without him. The question is, how many years later? I would say 5 years?

Answer 1

Einstein never thought of special relativity as his outstanding work: that would certainly be general relativity.

Lorentz had done a lot of the mathematical work needed for special relativity before Einstein showed up, including the modification of Maxwell's equations. Poincare had done, in addition, virtually all of the philosophical work needed for it. Einstein wasn't aware of the totality of this work, especially not of Lorentz's most recent work, so he essentially re-invented it; he also had a "cleaner" approach to it.

I think both Poincare and Lorentz would have come to the full framework of special relativity within a year or so of 1905: they were each very close, it would only have taken a sudden change of perspective, that could have been occasioned by a chance encounter. Both of these two were great mathematical thinkers in their own right, and Poincare was extraordinarily creative, one of the two or three greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.

There is no chance that this well-known problem would have held out long enough for Bohr to be the player.

Answer 2

Oh, no way 5 years. The reason Albert Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his Theories of Relativity is because nobody really understood them. That's how genius Einstein was. They gave him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his works on the photoelectric effect (sort of what happens to white shirts under black light), because they knew he deserved to get the Nobel Prize, they just couldn't understand what he meant by the Theories of Relativity.

However, it could have been 1 year or less that someone else could have explained relativity. And if they did, they probably wouldn't have explained it to the extent that Einstein did. Even today, it takes a vast amount of knowledge in this area to fully, or almost fully understand these concepts.

Albert Einstein wrote "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", a paper in 1905 on the Theory of Special Relativity. The Theory of General Relativity is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Einstein from 1907-1915.

So yes, surely relativity would have, in one way or another, have been made understandable by some other physicists, 5 or more years later, no-one can tell.

I hope this helped!

Answer 3

Relativity was actually first postulated by Galileo. What Einstein worked out was General Relativity and Special Relativity. General Relativity was already being worked on and Einstein simply helped firm it up. He actually got it wrong twice and had to publish new papers with math corrections. At one point Einstein actually had it right, but the math was in conflict with General science believed in. Einstein's math showed that the Universe was expanding and under the views of Astronomers and Physicists this was not correct. So Einstein changed his math to fit the model. This was a huge mistake as several scientists would later prove with other math that the universe was expanding and then Hubble showed the red shift in the spectrum which made a proof for this. Einstein's primary work, however, was in the concept of space, time, mass, energy, gravity and light. Einstein postultaed the mass grows smaller and time slows as you speed up. The time dilation was proven with dual atomic clocks. Einstein viewed space as a kind of fabric and that this fabric can be distored by gravity wells. The larger the gravity well the more distortion. That this distortion would cause an apparent visual shift, which was established during solar eclipses when stars visually close to the sun's disk were not exactly where they were supposed to be due to the gravity force of the sun, which is massive. Einstein postulated the the speed of light in a constant in all situations and nothing can go faster than light. It is hard to say what the others would have postulated at a later date. It is even hard to say what happened with Einstien. He and others were actually in serach of the holy grail of science. The unified field theory and it is possible that these pieces came from Einstein's work on the problem. In order to unify the concept of how things work one has to thoroughly understand each concept. We are dealing with magnetic waves, radiation, photonic light emissions, gravity. Einstein's work deals with all these factors but it doesn't present a common thread. It doesn't stipulate that WAVE=x2(y3) Or Gravity = Magnitism/Radition This is the kind of glue they were looking for. They were looking for either an algebric, trigonimic or caculitic way of describing how all elements of physic inter relate. A whole bunch of them has pieces of a puzzle, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Newton, Einstein and others. But there was no comprehensive way to explain how the puzzle fits together.

Answer 4

It's hard to say. On the one hand, there was a real crisis in physics. The Michaelson-Morley experiment contradicted Maxwell's equations under the Newtonian framework, so a basic problem was recognized. All that it really took was to take the pre-existing Lorentz Transformations seriously and see where it lead. However, there was an implicit sanctity of space-time rooted in intuition so deeply seated as to make tampering with it literally inconceivable, like challenging the Pythagorean Theorem.

Answer 5

Theories of relative motion existed during and before Einstein's lifetime. He put it together so that it made sense at speeds near the speed of light.

Answer 6

The Theory of Relativity is really small stuff compared to the theories of the really great scientists, including Neil Bohrs.Space travel is governed by Newtonian mechanics and will be for many years to come.

Answer 7

Something similar would have been developed within 5 to 10 years. If might have been even better. Now we're stuck with Einstein's version for the next century.