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Harry
That view "Someone else would have come up with the idea" is quite speculative. Maxwell's work led to Relativity but I don't know why that means that Maxwell would have then made the leap to relativity. The leap was to recognise that the apparent anomaly in the equations was explainable if mass, length and time were velocity dependent and not invariable.
It is true that often several research groups are close to the same discovery. What Albert did was to publish first but also describe the theory in a way others could get to grips with. He had models to describe the behaviour of matter and waves at high speed that others did not have as clearly.
Rather like Hawking's way of see the mathematics of black holes and space-time in "pictures".
But, SF - I like the political and social nature of societies that SF deals with. The "magic" stuff in fantasy seems a little like the same attraction that heavy metal has. Teenage boys and teenage fantasy... I think the characterisation is even weaker in fantasy than it is in SF - but neither are universally strong in that area. But boys don't do feelings - so that is ok.
Peter
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