But far more fundamentally, the laws of nature involved do not invoke the observer. Special relativity states simply that the length of the four-vector is invariant under transformation between inertial systems. Full stop. This does not invoke the observer any more than stating that the length of the three-vector is invariant under rotational transformations.
How Einstein discovered this does not matter. He could have come to this conclusion while tripping on acid, he could have had a divine revelation, he could have consulted an astrologer, for that matter. None of that would have changed the way the equations behave, nor the experimental results that confirm their utility.
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Keep on keeping on... Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
Welcome back, by the way. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buiter
But I don't agree, either. To say that intuition, or one's mental picture of the world has nothing to do with a discovery of a fundemental explanation of how the world works is just wrong. Maybe he could have solved the equation from the insights of an acid trip, but he didn't. That's says something about the difference between acid trips and human reason and experience. Instead he spent much of his time in a patent office imagining the issue of observing the same phenomenon and getting different results at different vantage points when a constant was needed instead. The observer was invoked for the expressed purpose of determining what is universal without an observer. And the implications of the theory are important for observers as well.
The observer was invoked for the expressed purpose of determining what is universal without an observer.
But you have one point which is that, at the time Einstein wrote, they were still mentally wedded to coordinate systems and the important thing was the rules for changing coordinates. In that sense Einstein was concerned with observers and not with what was universal. It's been over a century since 1905 and in the meantime physicists have adopted the mathematical point of view that what matters is the transformation group and its invariants, and that coordinates are not important. This transition started almost immediately with the work of Minkowski and others, especially Wheeler in the mid-1900's.
So you may be right about Einstein's heuristic basis for his discoveries but we already have a different understanding of them. Nevertheless, Einstein's thought experiments about train conductors flashing lights around relativistic trains remain useful to build intuition - too bad they are seldom mentioned to physicists in training. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buiter
To say that intuition, or one's mental picture of the world has nothing to do with a discovery of a fundemental explanation of how the world works is just wrong.
But I'm not. I'm saying that there are three distinct aspects of science:
However, as Einstein pointed out in relativity, there are places where it makes all the difference and ignoring that problem masks the truth.
You are using the language of bullets 2) and 3).
An insight to that effect may have inspired his discovery of special relativity, but it is not pointed out as an assumption in the theory itself. And the original source of inspiration is no more necessary to understand the theory of relativity than having an apple-induced headache is a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian gravity.
an apple-induced headache
