Oh look, another straw man. Now read very carefully.
The point is this: Einstein never came up with relativity while riding a bike, any more than Newton discovered gravity by looking at falling apples. Contrasting one popular misconception with another, is not misrepresenting an argument.
You confused "ideas" for well thought out and highly elaborated, tested, and confirmed "ideas".
Relativity is actually the culmination of nearly 15 years (later adjustments not included) of borderline obsession with the mathematical inconsistencies of Newtonian classical mechanics, which affect its predictive capabilities in special circumstances - hence the need for a theory of relativity in the first place.
In other words, there's a huge amount of mathematical understanding, trial, error and experimentation. He also made several adjustments to various tenets of relativity, owing to evidence found in the experiments of other physicists.
Relativity existed before anyone discovered it. Scientists didn't invent it or create the phenomenon. Someone can imagine it without all the math.
Since all of this was not done while riding a bike and there's actually a lot of math involved - your comment was demonstrably wrong.
I never said that. You inferred that, and asserted that I did. I've pointed this out many times.
Relativity wasn't created by Einstein while he was riding a bike, and there was so much math involved it took the experiments of several physicists and astronomers, as well as refinements to Einstein Field Equations for us to get to relativity in all its predictive capability that we now see it with today.
Again, no one created relativity. You're throwing a bunch of other combined ideas and saying that they are included in the idea of relativity. Did I say the Theory of Relativity? Did I try to exclude the hard work that was involved? No, I said the idea of relativity and that there was work involved.
Math is the slow and difficult way of understanding ideas. It doesn't allow you to make connections easily. Einstein for example came up with the idea of relativity while riding a bike, so it's likely that there wasn't much actual math involved. Math is used to explain the idea only after the idea has been had.
You completely refused to see that because your whole argument is based on me saying otherwise.
Am I wrong? Is math
not used to describe phenomena?
You know for someone who quotes Einstein a lot, it sure is strange the way you so disrespectfully diminish the sheer amount of effort he and his colleagues put into their work.
I post an Einstein quote and you say his words diminishes his efforts? Why do you think he is quoted for saying that? I didn't attach any other words to convince you of anything, and you interpreted it as diminishing Einsteins work?
The Einstein quote is directly related to the original post. They were asking how someone could come up with an "idea" of something so complicated. I thought the quote was pretty spot on. It also just so happens to support my idea and point out a personality flaw.
How do physical know that a particular mathematical model fits a certain phenomena? How did Heisenberg come up with the idea of matrix mechanics? How did the string theorists know that the euler beta function can be used to describe whatever phenomena that it describes?
Intuition is the answer... They were intuitive.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
― Albert Einstein
It means, ideas first via intuition. Followed by lots and lots of hard work. I really don't think that I'm bashing his quote or diminishing anyone's hard work.
I was trying to be helpful and I never implied that there was no math involved. You keep saying that like I did. Doesn't make it more true and it's the basis of your argument. Other than calling out "straw man" as an argument. You're probably just doing that because I reference it in another thread, and not because it adds any value. Calling out "straw man" argument is "literally" a straw man argument, unless you justify it with reason.
Originally Posted by computerhxr
You call ideas useless, even though they are not.
Could you find the part where I said that?
Plus without Einstein Field Equations (among other things), relativity has no exceptional predictive capability - and is therefore useless. The real beauty of relativity.
Just because something
isn't predicative doesn't mean that
it is useless.
No. I called ideas without predictive capability useless for predicting things. It's pretty obvious and I wasn't sure I needed to point it out really, although you seem to have a hard time understanding it. So let's do a little experiment.
I'm not having a hard time. You never said "
for predicting things" which means that you said it was just useless.
You're trying too hard to make me look like an idiot, when all you're doing is luring me down a path and forcing me to be an ass.
Don't bother responding because I'm just going to ignore it. 
Find another thread to try and bash me in.
the part that is truly amazing is that our reality is coherent enough to be consistently following what seem to be reproducable laws of sorts.. - everything about math is just a consequence of that.
