Jules Henri Poincaré,[7] Paul Drude,[8] Paul Langevin,[9] and many others, slowly developed the theory, step by step, and based it on thousands of years of recorded thought and research.
Sure. That's how science works, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. I think Einstein himself said SR was 'ripe for discovery'. He just happened to connect the dots into a consistent picture slightly before anyone else.
The real irony is pre announces this like it is some sort of discovery. If you read Einstein papers on SR and GR he makes it adamantly clear where the basis of SR and GR came from. Lorenz, in particular, was critical.
As Kellog pointed out, this is how
real science works. Every new discovery is built on the foundations of old discoveries. Looking for that kind of backking is the ultimate scientific BS detector - legitimate hypotheses and theories do not form
ex nihilo, but instead are built on past discoveries.
Bryan
