1. How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity
How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity? Three Possible Ways John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science Center for Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh

2. Experimentally Driven Pathway✗
Experimentally Driven Pathway
Reflections on certain puzzling experiments, notably the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Consequences
Excessive focus on the question: did Einstein know about the Michelson-Morley experiment?
Obliteration of most of the history.
Origins
Oversimplified experiment-based pedagogy.
Oversimplified empiricist philosophy of science.

3. Philosophically Driven Pathway✗
Philosophically Driven Pathway
Reflections on what is really means to say that something moves, that events are simultaneous, etc. led to the theory.
Origins
Power of Einstein’s 1905 analysis of simultaneity; logical simplicity of his formulation.
Ease of comprehension of the kinematical part versus the electrodynamical part of Einstein’s analysis.
Consequences
Newton and Newtonians guilty of just not thinking hard enough.
Excessive focus on where Einstein may have found inspiration for the light signaling narrative used in 1905.

4. Electrodynamically Driven Pathway
Special relativity can only emerge once we have established the behavior of systems that move very rapidly.
Newtonian theory based on slowly moving bodies: falling masses, planets, etc.
Maxwell’s electrodynamics is the first theory to give reliable accounts of things moving very fast, e.g. light.
Special relativity is buried in Maxwell’s electrodynamics and awaits someone to find it.
“On the electrodynamics of moving bodies” resulted from seven and more years of intense work by Einstein on problems in electrodynamics; and it is overtly about electrodynamics.

5. Lorentz’s Theorem(s) of Corresponding States
A hard problem in Newtonian physics.
Solved by its satisfaction of the principle of relativity.
Redescribe the same system in the rest frame of planet.
Alternative description of the same system
Galilean transformation

6. Lorentz’s Theorem(s) of Corresponding States
A hard problem in electrodynamics.
Cannot be solved by the principle of relativity. Fails in electrodynamics.
Find closest, but different, system in the rest frame of the charge.
A different system; close in properties; distorted; “corresponding.”
Lorentz transformation
Einstein: yes it can!
Einstein: the right way to redescribe systems in different inertial frames of reference.
Einstein: a redescription of the same system in another frame of reference.