What if Sir Isaac Newton had conceived of General Relativity?

Actually, up to a point anyway, he almost certainly did. That's why he made the explicit, formal assumption that space was absolute. Because he had conceived of the possibility that it wasn't. Indeed, it's not really that big a step from the concept of Universal Gravitation to General Relativity. All you really need is non-Euclidean geometry for curved space, and, given everything else that Newton came up with -- Calculus, Universal Gravitation, the Laws of Motion, the concepts of Kinetic and Potential Energy -- it seems unlikely that he would have found this particularly difficult. Particularly if he was convinced that space and time were one, and relative. Which would imply that space could be curved, and he'd have to make calculations based on this curvature. But, he doesn't appear to have made any attempt to develop or investigate that concept of relative space and time, of "space-time". Why, exactly? I think there are a number of pretty plausible reasons for this. 1. Relativity violates Occam's Razor. As far as we can deterimine from everyday life, space and time are absolute, and not relative. Why assume that they could be otherwise? Of course, we could make arguments and conceive of hypothetical situations in which they might not be, but, why bother? It's not the simplest hypothesis. 2. Science is supported by governments to assist governments in ordering and regulating society. Hence, governments want scientists to be useful, and comprehensible. Galileo was harassed by the Holy Inquisition, for example, because his work was destructive to a comprehensible order of the Universe -- the Ptolemaic System -- without putting forward any very meaningful alternative. He was making the established order of things and, hence, the authorities, look bad. Isaac Newton was, in his own way, a very astute politician, he was a Member of Parliament, and Master of the Mint. He would have been well aware that arguing publicly that time could slow down and stop, and a single atom could become infinitely massive, would not particularly have been conducive to good public order. After all, why show up to work for your master at all, if time and space don't necessarily really exist in any predictable form, at all? 3. Newton had a very wide range of interests and responsibilities. He didn't really need the extra work. So, it seems unlikely that Newton would have written out his own version of General Relativity, and published it. But, suppose that he had. What would have happened, exactly? I suspect he would have lost his position. The work on Relativity would have been surpressed, one way or another. And, the rest of his work would have been somewhat discredited, by association. It might have been several more generations before Newtonian mechanics were accepted, or rediscovered. Perhaps, by someone like Gauss, for example. This brings up the question, of course, why is Relativity considered Gospel, now? The Theory of Relativity actually exists in a tradition deriving from the philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, who created the "dialectical method", for achieving truth. The idea of the dialectical method, is that truth can be approximated, by opposing two highly divergent positions, and finding a common ground between them. Thus, dialecticians, up to a point, try to present positions that oppose current truisms. The best known, of course, is Karl Marx. Marxism opposes the truisms of capitalist economics with diametrically opposed positions, systematically, in his "dialectical materialism". Another example, I would say, is Sigmund Freud, whose sexual theories opposed Victorian notions that sexuality should be systematically suppressed. Albert Einstein's theories are another example. Einstein opposes, quite counterintuitively, his notions of the relativity of Space and Time, to Newtonian assumptions that space and time are absolute. He was successful, probably because of the spirit of the time. In the post-World War I period, people were experimenting with new and unusual ideas, in the hopes that WWI would be the "War to end all Wars." Didn't work too well, did it? But, Relativity was another one of these ideas. Relativity is still with us, of course, because the academic world is very heavily invested in Relativity indeed! To such an extent, that even the most obvious tests are being avoided, and ignored, lest they prove it wrong. For example, the Parker Solar Probe will, in a few years, achieve such high speeds that the special theory of Relativity could be tested simply by comparing the Probe's own computer clocks with an online stopwatch at mission control. It would cost nothing. But, is NASA doing this? Of course not! What waste of taxpayer money, on something so thoroughly proven! I think you get the picture, don't you?