There may never be another Einstein or another Newton, and the bar is set higher than ever for anyone to be the next incredible revolutionary. But we should neither assume it’s impossible, nor should we assume that we would have arrived at all of the same laws and theories in the same way had they not existed. (Credit: Orrin Turner (L), Godfrey Kneller (R))

Without Einstein, we might have missed General Relativity

Einstein’s “happiest thought” led to General Relativity’s formulation. Would a different profound insight have led us forever astray?

Back in the late 1800s, what we thought of as “fundamental science” was rapidly advancing, leading to two different conflicting perspectives. Among most of the old guard, Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism represented a spectacular achievement: making sense of electricity and magnetism as a single, unified phenomenon. Along with Newtonian gravity and the mechanical laws of motion, it seemed that everything in the Universe could soon be explained. But many others, including many young and emerging scientists, saw precisely the opposite: a Universe on the verge of a crisis.

At speeds approaching the speed of light, time dilation and length contraction violated Newton’s laws of motion. When we tracked the orbit of Mercury over centuries, we found that its precession deviated from the Newtonian prediction by a small but significant amount. And phenomena like radioactivity simply couldn’t be explained within the existing framework.

The coming decades would see many revolutionary developments take place: special relativity, quantum mechanics, mass-energy equivalence, and nuclear…