system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Were any other Physicists close to discovering something similar to Albert Einstein's breakthroughs?

So what I mean is were there any scientists that might have discovered or were close to discovering something like relativity or another of his theories?
gpt
With regards to special relativity, Poincare and Lorentz were headed in the right direction but Einstein really tied it all together. Lorentz had figured out the mathematical aspect but wasn't using it with the right physics in mind. With general relativity, there was Gunnar Nordstrom who came out with a similar but incorrect theory of curved spacetime, and David Hilbert, who shares credit for the Einstein-Hilbert action.

With regards to the early development of quantum mechanics, he really built a lot on Planck's ideas, and vice versa.