Quote:
Originally Posted by =X=
Your assertion that Maxwell would have discovered Relativity with a year of Einstein is really quite an intriguing one especially considering Maxwell died in 1879 and Einstein did not postulate his theory until 1905.
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Doh!
You're absolutely right; my apologies. Given that I've written textbooks on EM, I really should know that, shouldn't I?
. A "senior moment", obviously.
OK, then, not Maxwell (clearly!) but once the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment became well-known, people like Fitzgerald and Lorentz were postulating what were basically expressions of SR. They would have got there pretty soon, I'm sure.
Apologies for the goof, but I stand by my basic point - that both relativity and quantum theory were made more or less inevitable by the knowledge gained by experimental physicists in the final decades of the 19th century. "Classical" physics just couldn't stand up to the reality of the experimental results.