Posted: Jul 25, 2011 11:25 pm
Wheee! It's not anybody's fault that your education was so poor that you think that Einstein discovered relativity and are therefore susceptible to all sorts of fashionable nonsense.
Einstein ofcourse was great but the idea of him being the biggest of 20th century physicists and that he alone figured out relativity from scratch is simply not true. Paul Dirac and Henry Poincare for example were mathematically beyond most humans and Einstein was human compared to them.
Well,
1) The principle of relativity was discovered by Galileo. Heard of him? The guy with the telescope and the Catholics?
2) Relativity was implicit in Newtonian physics.
3) The wave theory of light, in conjunction with the supposed "luminiferous aether" put Galilean relativity into question.
4) Certain experiments, such as the Michelson-Morley experiments, gave the null hypothesis against an absolute universe and seemed to support relativity.
5) Lorentz came up with some math, which is simple high-school stuff, which made the Michelson-Morley experiment work with an absolute universe, based on the idea that matter was compressed by the aether when it traveled through it. So did Fitzgerald.
6) Lorentz later came up with some math, which is also simple high-school stuff, that incorporated time into his equations. These became the Lorentz transformations, though at this point they were purely ad hoc. Everybody, including Einstein, gives Lorentz credit. That is why they are called the "Lorentz transformations." Get it?
7) Poincaré made a much better statement of the principle of relativity than Galileo did. He is credited for this, too.
8) Einstein came up with a theory that showed how things would work without referring to the Luminiferous Aether at all. It's very simple high-school stuff, and you only need to understand what a right triangle is and the Pythagorean theorem to grasp it.
Apparently, your poor education did not include much of this.
That's not all that Einstein did. He also came up with General Relativity, which incorporates acceleration of all sorts of kinds and gravity into relativity. It is, on one side, an extremely simple theory. It's also very hard to solve and work out. He used the help of a lot of people, including Hilbert and Emmy Noether (who was probably not covered in your education either) on some of the details. That was truly amazing, especially as observations confirmed it's modeling of the precession of Mercury and gravitation lensing (which is off by a factor of 2 from Galilean/Newtonian concepts).
None of this is due to Einstein's math whiz skills. Unlike what you may have been taught, he was very good at math. Hilbert was better in some regards, though three of his conjectures were pretty easily dispatched by Gödel, Turing and Church.
What we respect Einstein for was not his math skills. It was his insights. Math skills are a dime a dozen. Penetrating insight is not, and that's what we remember him for.
I'm not going to go into other things your poor education hasn't prepared you for. There doesn't seem to be much point.