It's not as obvious as you make it seem, just like it isn't obvious that the man who discovered the wheel is the father of automotive industry. "Nuclear fission of heavy elements was discovered in 1938 by Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Otto Robert Frisch." -wikip, Fermi set up the first "reactor" at UC in '42. Einstein's role at this point was mainly political, he was the Big Cheese in the field, and his letter in support of developing a nuclear weapon was prompted by Germany's nuclear weapons research. His warning made the threat more viable, that's all.
If you mean the whole atomic age wouldn't have been possible without the neat formula, i can't argue against that -- a car would be impossible if someone hasn't invented the wheel first.
Well the thing that I am trying to say is while the development of a nuclear reactor is kind of "scientific grunt work" since the theories and speculations had already been made. All they needed was to put the pieces together and make it work more or less.
What Albert did however with discovering E=MC^2 was a revolutionary way of thinking. Putting the importance it has on everything else aside it told of unimaginable quantities of energy that could be unleashed from matter. It was not that radioactivity divided atoms but that it could produce scary amounts of energy. Without this breakthrough in thinking it would take years or perhaps decades until we would get there with ordinary science. Albert Einstine could singlehandedly be responsible for the Manhattan project not starting this year instead of back during WW2.
I'm not disputing Einstein's brilliance, and E=mc
2 is certainly a neat package. The only thing we don't agree on is the matter of degree. It's not something i can logically argue, just a matter of opinion.
For instance, i agree with this:
"E = mc
2 has sometimes been used as an explanation for the origin of energy in nuclear processes, but mass–energy equivalence does not explain the origin of such energies. Instead, this relationship merely indicates that the large amounts of energy released in such reactions may exhibit enough mass that the mass-loss may be measured, when the released energy (and its mass) have been removed from the system." -- wikip again, sorry 'bout that, it's just so darn handy.
Einstein came up with that relationship way back in 1905, almost 40 years before things started jumping -- another thing to consider. But i don't even think we disagree. Just semantics.
