Ive gone through the thread and dont see what supports your argument. The top comment quotes Einstein himself, but here’s his own final statement from that quot

Ive gone through the thread and dont see what supports your argument. The top comment quotes Einstein himself, but here’s his own final statement from that quote: > The new feature of it was the realization of the fact that the bearing of the Lorentz transformation transcended its connection with Maxwell's equations and was concerned with the nature of space and time in general. A further new result was that the "Lorentz invariance" is a general condition for any physical theory. This seems like a massive leap even given what Lorentz and Poincaré were coming up with, which is all at that point trying to understand what the math leads to and no real intuition on what that means in reality. Einstein on the other hand came up with something that had almost no mathematical underpinning (his first paper had no derivation). The final conclusion of the author in that comment, that this insight was only a year away, is thus completely unfounded in my opinion. In that thread itself someone quotes Feynman concluding the same. I’ll listen to Kip Thorne, Feynman and my own intuition for now until someone gives a fairly thorough reasoning for their skepticism then. I would also make a point of not quoting Einstein himself on such nuanced takes. He spent basically 30 years just commenting on his own theory and its motivations every single day. One would assume he would have decided to be more modest on some of those occasions in a mere whim or to placate that particular audience.