I firmly believe Newton would have gotten to relativity before Einstien if he were born at the same time.
But it wasn’t the end results and complex formulas of Einstein’s theory that showed the flaws and gaps in Newton’s mechanics.
It was the basic questions and thought experiments in Einstein’s first script. About basic geometry, length and width. The flow of time, the speed of a signal. Concurrency.
It should have been possible to think these thoughts at Newton’s time.
No it shouldn’t? Without Mercury’s orbit having been noticed, there was no need yet to question Newton’s theory, they simply worked as far as anyone could see; so why complicate it? And without the Lorentz transformation, the math Einstein used wasn’t there. And without Fizeau’s experiment, the fact that the speed of light is the same in every frame wasn’t known, and that’s a huge part of the theory. And if he had intuited it somehow, the Maxwell’s equations were even there either. Special relativity is at it’s core a way reconcile Maxwell’s equations with the core tenants of Newton’s theory.
There was no way special relativity could’ve been found even half a century earlier, let alone over two centuries…
The thoughts experiment are no different from the maths and wouldn’t have occurred in any context, or at least wouldn’t have come close to yielding the same conclusions. The most famous one was Einstein imagining himself riding a beam of light iirc. As you say, he imagined time and space stretching. Why would someone have imagined that in the 1600s? What reason was there to think riding light was any different from riding a very fast stream on a boat? Who knew then that you couldn’t just add the speed of lights to other speeds like you do in every galilean frame in Newtonian physics?
You conceded that Fizeau’s experiments were a starting point. These experiments would’ve never happened without the questions raised by the discrepancy between Newton and Maxwell’s laws! And if they had, someone with no prior knowledge of Maxwell’s laws wouldn’t have had any interest or use for these results.
But it wasn’t the end results and complex formulas of Einstein’s theory that showed the flaws and gaps in Newton’s mechanics.
It was the basic questions and thought experiments in Einstein’s first script. About basic geometry, length and width. The flow of time, the speed of a signal. Concurrency.
It should have been possible to think these thoughts at Newton’s time.
No it shouldn’t? Without Mercury’s orbit having been noticed, there was no need yet to question Newton’s theory, they simply worked as far as anyone could see; so why complicate it? And without the Lorentz transformation, the math Einstein used wasn’t there. And without Fizeau’s experiment, the fact that the speed of light is the same in every frame wasn’t known, and that’s a huge part of the theory. And if he had intuited it somehow, the Maxwell’s equations were even there either. Special relativity is at it’s core a way reconcile Maxwell’s equations with the core tenants of Newton’s theory. There was no way special relativity could’ve been found even half a century earlier, let alone over two centuries…
I wasn’t talking about Astronomy at all.
That was needed only for the end results. Not in the introductory thoughts that I was talking about.
Good point here. That was in fact one of the starting points for Einstein.
Again you are looking at the end results only, when the theory was complete.
Have you even read my comment?
Have you even read Einstein?
The thoughts experiment are no different from the maths and wouldn’t have occurred in any context, or at least wouldn’t have come close to yielding the same conclusions. The most famous one was Einstein imagining himself riding a beam of light iirc. As you say, he imagined time and space stretching. Why would someone have imagined that in the 1600s? What reason was there to think riding light was any different from riding a very fast stream on a boat? Who knew then that you couldn’t just add the speed of lights to other speeds like you do in every galilean frame in Newtonian physics? You conceded that Fizeau’s experiments were a starting point. These experiments would’ve never happened without the questions raised by the discrepancy between Newton and Maxwell’s laws! And if they had, someone with no prior knowledge of Maxwell’s laws wouldn’t have had any interest or use for these results.
Thank you for answering at least one of my questions, the last one, in so many words.
EOD.