brainoil comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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Lengths changing around is called "Lorentz transformations", and pre-dates 1901:
It took time and combined effort of many smart people to finalize the full theory complete with dynamics; the most fundamental bits such as transformations came first.
At Einstein's level, human abilities top out - it's like world's best athletes, the second best, the 100th best, they run about the same speed, for all practical purposes. Remaining variability in total distance those athletes run in their lifetime is largely due to how hard they work, and that one is also topping out. And the variability in how a layperson would attribute and misattribute discoveries has to do with quite random factors.