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Douglas_Knight comments on The Graviton as Aether - Less Wrong
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I guess faint praise is not well conveyed in writing. Hero worship is a bad reason. And I am nervous to draw any conclusions from hagiography.
Ohhh. I see what you're saying. Maybe there was a kind of hero worship... But a big reason, and the reason I took you to be giving, for preferring SR over Lorentzian aether is that SR makes GR possible. And there is no equivalent theory based off of aether theory. So the thinking (as I understand it) isn't Einstein produced SR and GR, GR is brilliant and true therefore so is SR. Rather, SR is pretty good and better than Lorentzian aether because from it Einstein produced GR which is brilliant and true.
Einstein's SR and GR work were actually looked on with huge suspicion for a while. It was his work on Brownian motion and quantization evidence from the photoelectric effect that were originally so warmly welcomed.
Can you say more? My understanding was that SR was picked up pretty quickly for more or less the reasons Einstein preferred it. But I'm not that familiar with the history.
Not without actually doing research -- I'm trying to speak at the level of generalities. It's perhaps wrong to conflate the reactions to SR and GR, and I'm possibly overstating how welcoming the community was to the idea of photons being quantized, but I think there is a reason his Nobel prize was given "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", with no explicit mention for either SR or GR.
I thought that was more about the committee being cautious and favoring experimental evidence over abstract theorizing. You don't want to give someone a Nobel prize and have them quickly turn out wrong.
If it were true that SR were necessary for GR, then SR would be a tremendous improvement on its competitors. really! I get that! But I don't see much reason to believe it. It looks like hagiography (=history rewritten because of hero-worship; probably FALSE) to me. I have not read Poincare, but I am skeptical his take was inadequate. Minkowski seems a big improvement over everyone else. If it took SR to produce Minkowski, then that's good for SR. Minkowski claims to be in Einstein's tradition. But maybe that's just because they're both German. (nationality was a pretty good predictor of people's views on the matter; I think nationalism was a big part of it.)
I'll think about this some and come back. The whole history is fascinating because the way SR and GR are usually explained (on television and in other popular treatments) it is as if Einstein was just sitting around and used his genius to invent it all whole cloth. So we have all this mythology about what a genius the guy was but the actual story looks like it is more about the collective power of science, of the process, than of one man's brilliance. Given what Lorentz and Poincare accomplished it seems pretty plausible that it wouldn't have taken more than 10-15 years for someone else to come up with SR- it probably would have been even less. Maybe the retrospective view doesn't convey scientific revolutions well but I don't even get the sense the Einstein was especially smarter than his contemporaries.
It seems to be a common view among phycisists that SR someone else would have come up with sooner or later (probably sooner), but GR required a critical insight so rare that had Einstein not existed, we might still not have an adequate theory of gravitation.
Once David Hilbert became aware of the problem, he almost beat Einstein to the punch.
ETA: Actually, looking at the history, it seems that Hilbert's interest in physics and mathematical prowess is not evidence that he could have come up with the necessary physical insight. He didn't become interested in GR until well after Einstein had laid the groundwork.