If Einstein did not discover Theory of Relativity in 1905, how many years did it take others to discover?

It is generally misunderstood by general public that if Einstein didn't exist, there is no Theory of Relativity. But it's not true. Other great physicist like Niels Bohr surely would have discovered it without him. The question is, how many years later? I would say 5 years?|||Einstein never thought of special relativity as his outstanding work: that would certainly be general relativity.





Lorentz had done a lot of the mathematical work needed for special relativity before Einstein showed up, including the modification of Maxwell's equations. Poincare had done, in addition, virtually all of the philosophical work needed for it. Einstein wasn't aware of the totality of this work, especially not of Lorentz's most recent work, so he essentially re-invented it; he also had a "cleaner" approach to it.





I think both Poincare and Lorentz would have come to the full framework of special relativity within a year or so of 1905: they were each very close, it would only have taken a sudden change of perspective, that could have been occasioned by a chance encounter. Both of these two were great mathematical thinkers in their own right, and Poincare was extraordinarily creative, one of the two or three greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.





There is no chance that this well-known problem would have held out long enough for Bohr to be the player.|||Yes, most people don't learn about them.


By the way, I have unbounded admiration for Niels Bohr: In a way, his contribution is greater even than Einstein's. But he was just in the wrong generation of physicists to solve the issue that became relativity.

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|||It's hard to say. On the one hand, there was a real crisis in physics. The Michaelson-Morley experiment contradicted Maxwell's equations under the Newtonian framework, so a basic problem was recognized. All that it really took was to take the pre-existing Lorentz Transformations seriously and see where it lead. However, there was an implicit sanctity of space-time rooted in intuition so deeply seated as to make tampering with it literally inconceivable, like challenging the Pythagorean Theorem.|||Theories of relative motion existed during and before Einstein's lifetime. He put it together so that it made sense at speeds near the speed of light.|||The Theory of Relativity is really small stuff compared to the theories of the really great scientists, including Neil Bohrs.Space travel is governed by Newtonian mechanics and will be for many years to come.|||Oh, no way 5 years. The reason Albert Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his Theories of Relativity is because nobody really understood them. That's how genius Einstein was. They gave him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his works on the photoelectric effect (sort of what happens to white shirts under black light), because they knew he deserved to get the Nobel Prize, they just couldn't understand what he meant by the Theories of Relativity.





However, it could have been 1 year or less that someone else could have explained relativity. And if they did, they probably wouldn't have explained it to the extent that Einstein did. Even today, it takes a vast amount of knowledge in this area to fully, or almost fully understand these concepts.





Albert Einstein wrote "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", a paper in 1905 on the Theory of Special Relativity. The Theory of General Relativity is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Einstein from 1907-1915.





So yes, surely relativity would have, in one way or another, have been made understandable by some other physicists, 5 or more years later, no-one can tell.





I hope this helped!|||Something similar would have been developed within 5 to 10 years. If might have been even better. Now we're stuck with Einstein's version for the next century.