From my patchy understanding of relativity, the speed of light being same to all observers is the key ‘hypothesis’ that leads to other consequences like time dilation, relativity etc.
But how did Einstein come to this ‘hypothesis’? Was it just a moment of extraordinary inspiration or were there other ‘hints’ that lead to this? I mean Michelson Morley experiment ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley\_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment) ) was well over a decade earlier. So how come nobody else thought of the idea of speed of light being a constant to everyone?
Follow up question: from this hypothesis, is the space-time continuum also an obvious conclusion? Or did it require another inspired genius moment?
(I use hypothesis in quotes to illustrate that it was indeed a hypothesis when proposed).
In: Physics
In addition to Michelson Morley, the speed of light is directly tied to the Maxwell Equations for the behavior of electromagnetism, which means that there are some uncomfortable implications to a speed of light that depends on the speed of the observer – essentially, the physics governing electromagnetism would have to change depending on how fast you were moving. In general, it has been observed that this is not the case. Physics seems to behave the same regardless of where you are. This means that it’s not a completely crazy idea that the speed of light must be constant in all reference frames.
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