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
Einstein wasn’t the first to conclude the speed of light was constant irrespective of reference frame. What he did was figure out what that really meant – how things would look to an observer in a relativistic reference frame. This required a complete reimagining of the very notions of space and time. It’s hard to appreciate how groundbreaking this was in the face of centuries of nearly unimpeachable Newtonian mechanics that viewed space as immutable and time as universal. How many times must he have scratched his head and thought, “this can’t be right” before finally becoming convinced without any empirical evidence that he was correct ?
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