Interestingly, the history of this kind phenomenon is the other way around. Einstein introduced special relativity in 1905. Well before that, around 1889, physicists started to notice that the Lorentz transformation was necessary to get a self-consistent description of electric and magnetic fields.
In the 16 intervening years, physics classes must have been rather confusing: how did people feel about transforming coordinates into a moving frame in a manner that pretty much required length contraction, time dilation, and simultaneity violation before anyone really believed that the universe actually worked that way?
I guess it would probably be similar to stuff like Dark Matter or whatever, right? Here’s a kludge; the professor doesn’t like it either but somebody is working on it…
I often wonder about the “luminiferous aether”— it sounds a bit silly. If there were message boards form physicists back then, would there be a bunch of writing: “well, we think this is a bit dumb, we’re just using it to make the math work out” for us to read? I’m sure somebody’s checked their personal letters…
In the 16 intervening years, physics classes must have been rather confusing: how did people feel about transforming coordinates into a moving frame in a manner that pretty much required length contraction, time dilation, and simultaneity violation before anyone really believed that the universe actually worked that way?