Einstein beaten!

w00t! Physics What If :p:

This does belong in this board (barely),

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), made famous for his equations, died two years after moving to England to take up a post at cambridge, (IIRC the moving and his death are related)

It is generally thought that if he hadn't died, then he would have discovered Relativity before Einstein did (Special 1905, general 1915/6)

my question is what, if any, consequences would this have on the world in general?
 
Actually, I did read an article about Einstein and his theory of relativity and it mentioned that most probably Einstein didn't even come up with it. He appears to have been part of a close knit circle of friends and that they spent time talking about things and its probably from this group - and some particular individiual that I can remember - that the basis for E=MC2 came out from. However, it was Einstein that first wrote and presented it, so some credit does go to him.
 
Well, there's a couple of things there. Special relativity was something that was just waiting to come up; if Einstein had been hit by a bus in 1904, someone else would have developed it, probably within five years. General relativity was something else entirely; Einstein was really, really ahead of his time in developing that.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
Germany gets the bomb first...in 1915.

Not to hijack the thread but what if Faraday beat Maxwell? (Maxwell based his equations on Faraday's work.)
 
Germany gets the bomb first...in 1915.

Not to hijack the thread but what if Faraday beat Maxwell? (Maxwell based his equations on Faraday's work.)

Not a chance, Faraday was probably the greatest practical physicist the world has ever seen but his mathematics were limited and he would have never been interested in thought experiments. If he could not fiddle with it he was not interested.

Oh and why does everyone connect relativity and the Abomb? They are quite different and there is little or no synergy in developing both at once.
 
Oh and why does everyone connect relativity and the Abomb? They are quite different and there is little or no synergy in developing both at once.

I think people confuse it with E=mc2 -- which has a lot to do with the A-bomb...
 
Part of Einstein's genius WRT Special Relativity was BELIEVING what his equations told him.

Some of the work was done earlier (e.g. Lorentz of Lorentz contraction fame) but no one else was prepared to believe that it was 'real'.

That having been said, the fact is that people would have slowly pieced it together, and, probably within about 5 more years (as suggested above), some group of people. Minkowski is a name that springs to mind.


General relativity, OTOH, especially as a unified philosophically solid construct, was HUGE. Note that Tensors and differential geometry were only just recently invented (the first generally available work was 1900), and AFAIK, Einstein was the only one who seriously considered using them in physics the way he did.

Not only that, but 'Einsteinian notation' was a huge advance in making tensors USABLE, and ALSO his tensors behaved only (as Special Relativity's version of 4 dimensional space-time isn't a standard Cartesian space).


Yes, I'm a math/theoretical physics major and I own a copy of Misner-Thorne-Wheeler....
Edit: OK, WAS such a major decades ago. (sigh!)
Edit2: I took Differential Geometry in the Math department and General Relativity in the Physics department, and so I have a good idea of the differences between e.g. Levi-Civitta and Einstein's approaches.
 
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