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.
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.