Can you say more? My understanding was that SR was picked up pretty quickly for more or less the reasons Einstein preferred it. But I’m not that familiar with the history.
Not without actually doing research—I’m trying to speak at the level of generalities. It’s perhaps wrong to conflate the reactions to SR and GR, and I’m possibly overstating how welcoming the community was to the idea of photons being quantized, but I think there is a reason his Nobel prize was given “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”, with no explicit mention for either SR or GR.
I thought that was more about the committee being cautious and favoring experimental evidence over abstract theorizing. You don’t want to give someone a Nobel prize and have them quickly turn out wrong.
Can you say more? My understanding was that SR was picked up pretty quickly for more or less the reasons Einstein preferred it. But I’m not that familiar with the history.
Not without actually doing research—I’m trying to speak at the level of generalities. It’s perhaps wrong to conflate the reactions to SR and GR, and I’m possibly overstating how welcoming the community was to the idea of photons being quantized, but I think there is a reason his Nobel prize was given “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”, with no explicit mention for either SR or GR.
I thought that was more about the committee being cautious and favoring experimental evidence over abstract theorizing. You don’t want to give someone a Nobel prize and have them quickly turn out wrong.