The failures of Newton’s Laws created a specific problem. It invited particular solutions. It wasn’t just Einstein and Poincaré, but also Hendrik Lorentz and David Hilbert who were working on a possible remedy.12 Indeed, the so-called relativity priority dispute is about who invented what, when.13 And that is why the seductive idea that if Einstein had been born three hundred years earlier, we could have had the benefit of the theory of relativity in the seventeenth century is so flawed. Relativity couldn’t have happened back then, largely because the problems that it responded to were not yet
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