Virginia Postrel's at the Ideas Conference, and poses an interesting question on her blog. It starts from the way Einstein conceived of relativity by imagining what a pair of lightning strikes would look like when viewed from a fast-moving train. Which prompts Virginia to ask:
The example made me wonder, Would Einstein have developed his theory if trains--or some other rapid form of transportation--hadn't been invented? Or was the familiar technology of high-speed travel essential to the intuitive leap?
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Brains, trains, and lightning - all a radiant blur.
well, let's see...
Einstein was a product of about 14 billion years of evolution of this universe...
so...
yeah, everything that evolved before him, including the evolution of high-speed travel, was "essential" for him to be "Einstein"...
yeah, ideas evolve...
for so many hundreds of thousands of years, newer ideas have evolved out of primitive ideas...
and that process was essential for the advent of Einstein...
now to continue that process...
it's helpful to put aside the primitive ideas...
hope that helps...
faith hope love joy peace to all...
If you read "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps" (a very good book), you'll get a much broader view of this question. A _huge_ question of the day was synchronizing timepieces, which involves the different observations by agents at different places and the time delays propagating signals. These are key to the development of special relativity (SR).
SR can also be developed by the simple requirement that the speed of light is the same to all observers and the rules of physics do not depend upon the relative speed of observers. Developments in electromagnetic theory as well as the null result of Michelson-Morley's searches for the variation in the observed speed of light relative to the Earth's passage through the hypothesized "aether" both require the universally observed speed of light.
Einstein made the amazing intuitive leap (nobody wanted to abandon universal time). However, the results (mathematical transformations for time and length) were nearly complete (although not believed to be real) from electromagnetic theory. And radio signals around the globe or clock synchronization across a city were leading to the appropriate questions even without trains.
I've heard of discussions of who would have come up with relativity if Einstein had never existed. There are candidates (including "several together").
Yes, I'm a physics geek :-) Hope this helps.
He could have used a fast moving river, a rolling rock, or a flying bird. Good grief!
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