> if Einstein hadn't proposed his theory of relativity, someone else eventually would have (especially as the evidence for it accumulated) though it probably wo

> if Einstein hadn't proposed his theory of relativity, someone else eventually would have (especially as the evidence for it accumulated) though it probably would have taken several decades Perhaps someone else would have worked out Special Relativity within a decade, e.g. Minkowski working off Maxwell's equations. > Einstein took about 10 years to generalize his "special relativity". A better mathematician could have done this much more quickly General relativity, however, is such a huge leap over special relativity, relying on both the "happiest thought in Einstein's life" (i.e the equivalence of gravity and acceleration) and complex math I don't understand, that it alone might have taken decades to "generalize" from Special Relativity.