Georgi,
okay, I've had my coffee ration and cigarettes. So I'll get back to you about reference frames;
Let's demystify. Yes, Al made a big splash in '05, maybe like when Apple unveiled the 'smart phone', but more for the photo-electric effect and e=mc^2 because that was where the bucks were in industry. But in the hard sciences, SR solved a problem that had progressively become urgent in the preceeding 48 years. Maxwell had blown the doors off Newton's coupe in 1867, by answering the hows and whys of chemistry and physics when chemistry ruled the roost. And swung wide the doors of astronomy which was always in the lead in mathematics. He was opaque, but not like Newton, simply consumed in his work. His students interpreted his theoretical results and he quickly became THE 'Inconvenient Truth' of the Newtonian, absolute predeterminism Age. Because, at every day speeds and distances, the constancy of light velocity was negligible to computational results. But over long terms and extrapolated to vast distances, the time parameter and distance parameter would analytically diverge to an unacceptable degree. But Newton was King of gravity and his theory of light allowed "v+c" which Maxwell's results refuted. And chemists had found a unification with physics in Maxwell because it showed that chemical reactions were predictable and stable due to that 'c' difference, and that chemical reactions of all sort could be understood as an electro-magnetic exchange of energy. C had to be constant everywhere for anything to work anywhere. Something had to give. And that something was what Einstein set out to find. The reference frame of the observer is arbitrarily assigned a 'rest position', the invariance of electromagnetic induction elsewhere moving at a constant velocity relative to the observer, is maintained by a co-efficiency of that velocity difference and the effects of velocity on the reactivity to induction by (say) the molten lava spewing forth on a distant rocky planet, or the photosynthesis of your salad greens. He didn't invent SR, he solved it. And what he found was that for light velocity to be constant relative to anything and everything, space and/or time had to give a little back. How you allocate your qualifications to that, I really can't say. Good Luck.
"Rods and Clocks?' yehh, they'll do. :-) jrc