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In his 1916 ground-breaking general relativity paper Einstein had imposed a restrictive coordinate condition, his field equations were valid for coordinate systems which are unimodular. Later, Einstein published a paper on gravitational…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2016-02-15 Galina Weinstein

Recent work on the history of General Relativity by Renn, Sauer, Janssen et al. shows that Einstein found his field equations partly by a physical strategy including the Newtonian limit, the electromagnetic analogy, and energy conservation.…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2016-06-03 J. Brian Pitts

Although implicit in the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution 40 years earlier, the issues raised by the theory of what are now known as black holes were so unsettling to physicists of Einstein's generation that the subject remained in a…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2009-11-11 Brandon Carter

We analyze some of Einstein's failures to accomplish tasks which he posed to himself, notably deterministic interpretation of Quantum mechanics and formulation of the Unified theory of physical interactions, putting them into broader…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-10-01 Petar Grujic

Einstein's contribution to relativity is reviewed. It is pointed out that Weyl gave first unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism and it was different than the five dimensional theory of Kaluza. Einstein began his work on…

General Physics · Physics 2019-02-06 S C Tiwari

In the standard cosmological theory one uses the Einstein concepts of space and time as were originally introduced for the special theory of relativity and the general relativity theory. According to this approach all physical quantities…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Moshe Carmeli

In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote a brief article where he suggested the possibility that a massive object acted as a lens, amplifying the brightness of a star. As time went by, this phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, has become a…

Popular Physics · Physics 2018-08-01 Jorge Pinochet , Michael Van Sint Jan

With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-31 Olimpia Lombardi

This paper aims to provide physics teachers with tools to help deepen the understanding of the laws of electromagnetism. The fundamental contributions of our proposal are: a) to use quotes from mythical characters in the history of science…

Physics Education · Physics 2025-07-14 L. E. Fuentes-Cobas , M. E. Fuentes-Montero

Einstein's theory of General Relativity is the benchmark example for empirical success and mathematical elegance in theoretical physics. However, in spite of being the most successfully tested theory in physics, there are strong theoretical…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2012-03-20 Niayesh Afshordi

The confrontation between Einstein's theory of gravitation and experiment is summarized. Although all current experimental data are compatible with general relativity, the importance of pursuing the quest for possible deviations from…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2007-05-23 T. Damour

In 1905 Einstein presented the Clock Paradox and in 1911 Paul Langevin expanded Einstein's result to human observers, the "Twin Paradox." I will explain the crucial difference between Einstein and Langevin. Einstein did not present the…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2012-05-07 Galina Weinstein

We first see that the inertia of Newtonian mechanics is absolute and troublesome. General relativity can be viewed as Einstein's attempt to remedy, by making inertia relative, to matter---perhaps imperfectly though, as at least a couple of…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2012-11-06 Alexander Afriat , Ermenegildo Caccese

Special relativity was discovered at the eve of the century, but finds its roots in the 19th century efforts to understand the optics and electromagnetism of moving bodies. These roots are reviewed in Parts 1 and 2, the latter being…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 J. Reignier

In an article published by Mauricio Nirenstein in 1925, a few months after the visit of Albert Einstein to Argentina, the author wrote various comments and references relative to the scientist's visit. In particular, Nirenstein mentioned a…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2008-07-02 Alejandro Gangui , Eduardo L. Ortiz

This is the first expression of my thoughts and my experiments with Nature about the mathematical description of the Universe. The theories about our surrounding Nature became popular from our ancient civilizations and may be from the…

General Physics · Physics 2021-08-31 Surendra Mund

Childhood and Schooldays: Albert Einstein, and the family members seemed to have exaggerated the story of Albert who developed slowly, learned to talk late, and whose parents thought he was abnormal. These and other stories were adopted by…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2012-05-22 Galina Weinstein

Before 1905, Poincar\'e stressed the importance of the method of clocks and their synchronization, but unlike Einstein, magnet and conductor (asymmetries in Lorentz's theory regarding the explanation of Faraday's induction) or chasing a…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2012-05-01 Galina Weinstein

Before developing his 1915 General Theory of Relativity, Einstein held the "Entwurf" theory. Tullio Levi-Civita from Padua, one of the founders of tensor calculus, objected to a major problematic element in this theory, which reflected its…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2012-02-21 Galina Weinstein

Most early twentieth century relativists --- Lorentz, Einstein, Eddington, for examples --- claimed that general relativity was merely a theory of the aether. We shall confirm this claim by deriving the Einstein equations using aether…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2015-05-19 Maurice J. Dupre , Frank J. Tipler