See also: covariance.
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter III "Relativity, the special theory" mentions that this fact and its importance (we want the laws of physics to look the same on all inertial frames, AKA Lorentz covariance) was first fully relized by poincaré in 1905.
And at that same time poincaré also immediately started to think about the other fundamental force then known: gravity, and off the bat realized that gravitational waves must exist. general relativities is probably just "the simplest way to make gravity Lorentz covariant".
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrBiDRZRK5g Maxwell Lagrangian Derivation by Dietterich Labs (2019)
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo-Z3RO-eeY Deriving the Maxwell Lagrangian by Pretty Much Physics (2019)
Articles by others on the same topic
The covariant formulation of classical electromagnetism is a way of describing electromagnetic phenomena using the principles of special relativity. It reformulates Maxwell's equations and the governing equations of electromagnetism in a covariant framework, allowing them to be consistently expressed in any inertial frame of reference. ### Key Components: 1. **Four-Vectors**: In the covariant formulation, physical quantities are represented as four-vectors and tensors.