Relativity did overturn the previous assumptions! It converted what were assumptions into the consequences of another theory.
A beautiful way of putting it. I like this phrasing because I think it shows how progress in science actually elevated our confidence in Newtonian behaviors by having them as a special case of a theory with a stronger foundation.
I got the idea from Max Tegmark's book "Our Mathematical Universe".
> Relativity is kind of the trivia of physics, it really has not informed much technology apart from a few things in space
GPS is kind of a huge one, though it technically is just a few clocks in space.
Only in *very* specific situations which are extremely extremely extremely unrelated and WELL out of both practical and theoretical bound to the human perception of reality.
Relativity is kind of the trivia of physics, it really has not informed much technology apart from a few things in space - compare this to, say, quantum electrodynamics which tells us why weird stuff happens in things we've made quadrillions of (not to mention quantum computing, etc.)
The only time we would have ever brushed up against it naturally might have been when we put clocks into space so that we could better send nukes into other parts of the globe.