I read the argument in the document you posted here. It talks about all the work of others before Einstein that contributed to the final work. Those things are not disputed, and have never been disputed in the physics community (though I didn't know about E=mc^2 by De Pretto, that sounds memory holed to me). Building on the work of others and putting it all together IS what physicists do. No one (including Einstein) thought that SR was that big of a deal, as far as physics goes because, every physics student knows about all the other stuff that led to it. What was great about it was that it brought everything together, and formed a paradigm shift in thought. It created a conclusive argument from many other arguments, instead of a bunch of disparate ones. It wasn't even recognized as that potent until later.
Great works are not all original works, but in taking the work that has gone before and showing that all that work is the same work. In theoretical physics, most of the greatest contributions have been exactly that type of marriage.
I am not defending Einstein, but rather showing that the argument that "he only used other people's work" is not a good argument, in fact its a terrible one. That is what all scientists do and specifically, all theoretical physicists.
I read the argument in the document you posted here. It talks about all the work of others before Einstein that contributed to the final work. Those things are not disputed, and have never been disputed in the physics community (though I didn't know about E=mc^2 by De Pretto, that sounds memory holed to me). Building on the work of others and putting it all together IS what physicists do. No one (including Einstein) thought that SR was that big of a deal, as far as physics goes because, every physics student knows about all the other stuff that led to it. What was great about it was that it brought everything together, and formed a paradigm shift in thought. It created a conclusive argument from many other arguments, instead of a bunch of disparate ones. It wasn't even recognized as that potent until later.
Great works are not all original works, but in taking the work that has gone before and showing that all that work is the same work. In theoretical physics, most of the greatest contributions have been exactly that type of marriage.
I am not defending Einstein, but rather showing that the argument that "he only used other people's work" is not a good argument, in fact its a terrible one. That is what all scientists do and specifically, all theoretical physicists.