Maxwell lives to discover relativity

What would be the consequences of James Clerk Maxwell avoiding stomach cancer and death at the age of 48 and living on to formulate and publish a theory of relativity at the earliest time in which it would be likely to him to? Would it greatly affect technological development or the timeline of discoveries in physics?
 

amphibulous

Banned
You don't have the first version of the Michaelson-Morley experiment until 1887; SR comes in 1905, so you can't really speed it up by more than a decade. There are no real technological impacts - certainly not earlier nuclear weapons. The empirical observation of fission decay was quite enough to tell people that uranium contains a lot of energy if you can just speed that reaction up, and the famous equation isn't really a great help in bomb making.
 
Top