I don’t recall the source, but I remember hearing from a physicist that if Einstein hadn’t discovered the theory of special relativity it would surely have been discovered by other scientists at the time, but if he hadn’t discovered the theory of general relativity it wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s. More specifically, general relativity has an approximation known as linearized gravity which suffices to explain most of the experimental anomalies of Newtonian gravity but doesn’t contain the concept that spacetime is curved, and that could have been discovered instead.
While I am certainly not an expert on this topic, the claim that general relativity wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s without Einstein seems false to me. David Hilbert was doing similar work at the same time, and from what I’m aware there was something of a race between Einstein and Hilbert to finish the work first, with Einstein winning narrowly (on the order of days). More information can be found on Wikipedia pages: History of General Relativity and Relativity Priority Dispute.
I’ve just examined the two Wikipedia articles you link to and I don’t think this is an independent discovery. The race between Einstein and Hilbert was for finding the Einstein field equations which put general relativity in a finalized form. However, the original impetus for developing general relativity was Einstein’s proposed Equivalence Principle in 1907, and in 1913 he and Grossman published the proposal that it would involve spacetime being curved (with a pseudo-Riemannian metric). Certainly after 1913 general relativity was inevitable, perhaps it was inevitable after 1907, but it still all depended on Einstein’s first ideas.
That’s a far cry from saying that these idea wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s, which I’m basing mainly on hearsay and I confess is much more dubious.
I don’t recall the source, but I remember hearing from a physicist that if Einstein hadn’t discovered the theory of special relativity it would surely have been discovered by other scientists at the time, but if he hadn’t discovered the theory of general relativity it wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s. More specifically, general relativity has an approximation known as linearized gravity which suffices to explain most of the experimental anomalies of Newtonian gravity but doesn’t contain the concept that spacetime is curved, and that could have been discovered instead.
While I am certainly not an expert on this topic, the claim that general relativity wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s without Einstein seems false to me. David Hilbert was doing similar work at the same time, and from what I’m aware there was something of a race between Einstein and Hilbert to finish the work first, with Einstein winning narrowly (on the order of days). More information can be found on Wikipedia pages: History of General Relativity and Relativity Priority Dispute.
I’ve just examined the two Wikipedia articles you link to and I don’t think this is an independent discovery. The race between Einstein and Hilbert was for finding the Einstein field equations which put general relativity in a finalized form. However, the original impetus for developing general relativity was Einstein’s proposed Equivalence Principle in 1907, and in 1913 he and Grossman published the proposal that it would involve spacetime being curved (with a pseudo-Riemannian metric). Certainly after 1913 general relativity was inevitable, perhaps it was inevitable after 1907, but it still all depended on Einstein’s first ideas.
That’s a far cry from saying that these idea wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s, which I’m basing mainly on hearsay and I confess is much more dubious.