[catmistake]

I'd also like to point out that Einstein was humble, and the myth of Einstein that developed was not his doing. It was the common man, the everyday people and the press of the time that said, incorrectly, "wow! He is so smart, no one can understand what he is doing!" Which is patently false. Non-physicists could not be expected to understand Relativity. But the physicist peers of Einstein didn't have much trouble with it, contrary to Arthur Eddington's famous quote in response to the statement that only 3 people in the world understood Einstein, "I am trying to think who the third would be." False. Physicists of the day that looked at his work understood his work.

To Einstein's credit, one of the hallmarks of his genius, he had an ability to take complex ideas and describe them very simply, so that any might understand.

It is General Relativity that is Einstein's really only major contribution worth noting. And that is enough! Though he was first to describe Special Relativity, had he not, someone else would have within a few years of his publication. But had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear. But it also absolutely would have come from someone else had Einstein never existed.

Einstein is amazing, he is just not at all the myth that everyone thinks he was. He was just a humble theoretical physicist.

[ChrisLomont]

>It is General Relativity that is Einstein's really only major contribution worth noting.

Special relativity was a leap no one else was making, despite 20+ years of people knowing enough to make the leap. He also postulated light was made of photons (which was correct) to explain the photoelectric effect, which is another amazingly important thing. That one a Nobel Prize, but according to you, this is not a major contribution?

He developed the quantum theory of heat, also correct.

He gave solid empirical evidence for atomic theory using statistical physics.

He showed energy and mass are interchangeable (E=mc^2).

He predicted gravitational waves, just recently demonstrated, giving Thorne and other a Nobel. Had this demonstration been during Einstein's life, he would have gotten another Nobel prize.

He discovered the field equations predicted a dynamic, changing universe, something so far from thought at the time he tried to fight it by adding a cosmological constant, but he published the dynamic possibility anyways.

He (with Rosen) created a model of wormholes in 1935.

He invented Bose-Einstein condensates (Bose published statistics on photons, Einstein modified that to apply more widely and demosnteated completely new states of matter).

I could go on and on.

It's baffling you consider all this, especially one Nobel prize and enough for a second, to not be major contributions to physics.

>had Einstein not given us General Relativity, it might have taken another 50 or 75 years for that to appear

Also not true. As you yourself pointed out, Hilbert was right there, and if Einstein had not published, it would not have been more than a year until Hilbert (or a host of others) would have made the same discovery.

This "50 or 75 year" claim is just pulled from nowhere, like a lot of your other claims.

Rereading your posts on this, you clearly have selected at every possible point an anti-Einstein view, far more than is reasonable from the evidence. I could go on to post a ton more sourced items you get wrong.

Oh well, hopefully anyone reading this deep doesn't just believe the things you wrote, but takes some time to check them. I've provided enough places for them to start.

[catmistake]

I disagree as to your opinions, which seem to just disagree for the sake of disagreement. The elements of Special Relativity were around. I stand by the assertion that someone else would have developed that theory within a few short years had Einstein not. And I stand by the assertion that General Relativity, had Einstein not existed, would have taken several decades before anyone would have fully put it together.

For anything Einstein is given credit for after about 1918, it was just the momentum of his popularity. Anytime another name is on anything, it is that other name that did most of the work, and because it was based on Einstein's earlier work, his name went on it also. And this is absolutely normal and expected in academia. Nearly all physicists do their life's work before they are 30, usually by the time they are 23. Einstein was nearly 40 when he published his Theory of General Relativity, and that is extremely out of the ordinary. You are seeing things, perpetuating the myth, when you place Einstein, the man, central to any breakthroughs after about 1918.

[ChrisLomont]

> Einstein was nearly 40 ... extremely out of the ordinary.

Over all Nobel Prizes, it happened around 1/3 of the time. In Physics since 2000, it happened 80% of the time [1]. Care to rethink this claim?

Have you read the original papers? I have. Do you understand the math, and can do calculations related to relativity? I can.

Again the claim General Relativity was not being solved by others? I just demonstrated Hilbert was right on Einstein’s heels, with a paper published right after Einstein, with the same results.

Why stick to that gun when I just cited the evidence, that you can check yourself? The original papers are both online for you to read.

Einstein and Hilbert even worked quite a bit together on it. Of course Hilbert was interested and working on it too.

By several decades do you mean a few months? Is this time dilation?

I get the feeling you do not know either.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/16911-scientific-breakthroughs-g...

[catmistake]

The specific fallacies you have chosen to employ to attempt support your frail argument are interesting. I have read Special Relativity in translation, it is short enough and there is little math. My German is not even pedestrian, so no, I have not read Einstein's original article on General Relativity.

No, I meant what I said. Special Relativity would have appeared within a few years of Einstein's publication had it not occurred, but for General Relativity derived elsewhere would have taken decades at least. Hilbert didn't have it and wasn't on anyone's heels.

[ChrisLomont]

>General Relativity derived elsewhere would have taken decades at least

Is this based on the quality of evidence you used when you claimed people over 40 don't do much science? That turned out to be wildly incorrect.

What do you base the "decades" claim on? There was no new math needing invented, no new empirical evidence needed, no new physics needed, and many people were close at the time, and certainly more and more physicists were heading down the same paths.

BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.

[catmistake]

So in one breath you're saying GR would have appeared quickly if Einstein had not described it, and in the other you're saying he was the legend of his myth and productive his entire career.

It is simply my opinion that GR was so amazing, insightful, and non-obvious that it would have taken a similar miracle as Einstein himself for someone else to have intuited it and worked it out, but given enough time, eventually it would have appeared.

BTW, Einstein's most cited paper, by far, is from 1935, written when he was 56. I suspect that's some evidence he did good work after general relativity.

OR it is evidence that he had decent research assistants.