Bonus question: What is an invention that was really important and there is no telling how long we would have to wait for it to appear had it not been discovered by the one credited with it?
Bonus question: What is an invention that was really important and there is no telling how long we would have to wait for it to appear had it not been discovered by the one credited with it?
Well, I think Einstein was a genius but much of his work was built on Minkowski spacetime, so the conclusions about relativity could have been reached at some point when physicists were starting to work with it. I am in no expert position to judge this, but new developments in science do genuinely build on new insights, and Minkowski built the mathematical and theoretical platform that was evidently available to physicists like Einstein.