When we think about Einstein and the theory of relativity, all sorts of legends surround it. What was it that inspired him to conceive of the notion that there was no such thing as an aether, or a medium for light to travel through? What led him to the idea that the speed of light was a constant, unchanging for any and all observers, no matter how they were moving relative to one another?
There were many great advances that people like to point to. There was the Michelson-Morley experiment, which looked for motion through the aether and didn't detect any. There was the work of Lorentz and Fitzgerald, which showed that lengths contracted and time dilated when you moved close to the speed of light. And there was the work of Maxwell, who unified electricity with magnetism decades earlier.
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