Einstein said that light had two basic speeds. The normal measured speed of light in a vacuum (light's speed was first measured in air approximately in 1830) was not found to be exceeded in the Universe and was independent of the speed of its frame of reference, or the possible presence of an aether, as was confirmed by Michaelson and Morley. It varied in speed in transparent media of course, which was proportional to its refraction, which was proportional again to its energy, or wavelength. The independence of the speed to a moving source or frame of reference led Einstein to believe that light could be pure energy without mass, and represented the conversion of matter to energy, which for some reason did not need a medium to travel in wave fashion. That a photon is a massless enercle is a difficult concept to deal with. That matter is just congealed vortices of energy is also a bit hard to fathom.
That Einstein's theories were not complete is underscored by his lack of acceptance of and of this theories with quantum theory and the lack of agreement with Popper's determinism which served to predict many of the information factors that affected the modern electronic computational age.
Einstein never could resolve gravity with electromagnetism. He would have been very excited I think to discover that there were stars whose chief source of energy was magnetism, and that black holes existed.
There are many scientists who contributed to Einstein's discoveries, and deserve greater recognition than we have so far given them. Dirac, Heisenberg, Popper, Planck, Lisa Meitner, Rutherford, Curie, Maxwell, Rayleigh, Lorentz, Moseley, Thompson (Kelvin), Bohr, Schrodinger, Eddington and more deserve revisitation in terms of what they were able to discern about physical phenomena. The first person mentioned here to suggest that matter and energy may be equivalent and that nuclear fission was possible was in fact Meitner in 1924, from her chemistry experiments with Uranium that lost mass unexplainably.
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