> Q: In one of your talks you mention that the correct way to understand Einstein’s revolution is not as a theoretical, but as a technological revolution. Can you explain what you mean by that?
> A: ...A very interesting question is why and how Einstein’s work was able to shed its mundane origins and parade itself as theoretical, cosmological and universal.
The "mundane origins" here are Einstein's uses of the mostly then-relatively-new technologies of clocks, trains, bullets and rulers. I feel that the view Canales is setting out here is a mistaken reading of the history, and that Einstein was addressing "theoretical, cosmological and universal" concepts from the beginning, only referring to mundane entities for pedagogical purposes. By the late 1880's it was becoming clear that some of the further implications of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory were at odds with cosmological assumptions, a tension made more pointed by Michelson and Morley's 1887 aether-wind experiment.
Science doesn't have a conflict with philosophy, knowledge in any form has a conflict with people who can write an entire book without learning anything about their subject.
> A: ...A very interesting question is why and how Einstein’s work was able to shed its mundane origins and parade itself as theoretical, cosmological and universal.
The "mundane origins" here are Einstein's uses of the mostly then-relatively-new technologies of clocks, trains, bullets and rulers. I feel that the view Canales is setting out here is a mistaken reading of the history, and that Einstein was addressing "theoretical, cosmological and universal" concepts from the beginning, only referring to mundane entities for pedagogical purposes. By the late 1880's it was becoming clear that some of the further implications of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory were at odds with cosmological assumptions, a tension made more pointed by Michelson and Morley's 1887 aether-wind experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History