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>Just consider the crazy paradigm shift of special relativity and the guts it took to formulate a first axiom like “let’s assume the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference” defying the common sense of these days (and even of today…)

I'm not an expert on this. Wasn't this an observed phenomenon before Albert put together his theory?

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Weird problems with physics were everywhere before Einstein. Maxwell comes painfully close to discovering GR in some of his musings on black body radiation.

Noticing that there was a problem was not the breakthrough: trying something bizarre and counter-cultural - like assuming light speed is invariant over the observer - just to see if anything interesting drops out was the breakthrough.

It was an observed phenomenon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

Einsteins more impressive stuff was explaining that by time passing at different rates for different observers

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