Many scientists believe that if Einstein hadn't incorporated gravity into the theory there's a good chance that it would still be undiscovered today.
But aside from that a really worthwhile article.
Many scientists believe that if Einstein hadn't incorporated gravity into the theory there's a good chance that it would still be undiscovered today.
But aside from that a really worthwhile article.
Actually, no. If you start out with flat spacetime & try to describe massless spin-2 particles, you'll find gravity falls right out of the equations. It's quite elegant, really.
He says that he can't think of any luminary ideas and goes on to say this:
"If we can theorize that if Einstein had never existed it would have been 50 years (or 100 years or whatever you like) before someone else thought it up - we can probably classify it as luminary."
He doesn't say that the idea is luminary, he is simply lacking an example and theorises on the Einstein idea.
What this means is that Hilbert helped elaborate on the theory, and worked out some of the kinks.
Not to dismiss Hilbert, but the idea was Einsteins' and his alone.