Related papers: Einstein's Real "Biggest Blunder"
It is well known that, following the emergence of the first evidence for an expanding universe, Albert Einstein banished the cosmological constant term from his cosmology. Indeed, he is reputed to have labelled the term, originally…
What, if any, was Einstein's biggest mistake, the one most affecting our physics today? There is a perhaps apocryphal story, recounted by George Gamow, that he counted his cosmological constant as his biggest blunder. We now know his…
In 1956/1970 Gamow wrote that much later, when he was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the "biggest blunder" he ever made in his life. But the cosmological…
The cosmological constant, usually named Lambda, was introduced by Einstein in 1917 and abandoned by him as his biggest "blunder". It currently seems to make a spectacular comeback in the framework of the new cosmological standard model.…
Had Einstein followed the Bianchi differential identity for the derivation of his equation of motion for gravitation, $\Lambda$ would have emerged as a true new constant of spacetime on the same footing as the velocity of light? It is then…
Albert Einstein's journey to formulate the theory of general relativity involved significant shifts in his approach to gravitational field equations. Starting in 1912, he collaborated with Marcel Grossmann and initially explored broadly…
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…
In June 1930 Einstein visited Cambridge where he stayed with Eddington who had just shown that Einstein's supposedly static universe of 1917 was not stable. This forced Einstein to rethink his cosmology. He spent January and February 1931…
In 1917 Einstein initiated modern cosmology by postulating, based on general relativity, a homogeneous, static, spatially curved universe. To counteract gravitational contraction he introduced the cosmological constant. In 1922 Alexander…
The renaissance of General Relativity witnessed considerable progress regarding both understanding and justifying Einstein's equations. Both general relativists and historians of the subject tend to share a view, General Relativity…
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…
In December 1911, Max Abraham published a paper on gravitation at the basis of which was Albert Einstein's 1911 June conclusion about a relationship between the velocity of light and the gravitational potential. In February 1912, Einstein…
The main purpose of the present paper is to show that a correction of one mistake was crucial for Einstein's pathway to the first version of the 1915 general theory of relativity, but also might have played a role in obtaining the final…
Although Einstein's name is closely linked with the celebrated relation E = mc2 between mass and energy, a critical examination of the more than half dozen "proofs" of this relation that Einstein produced over a span of forty years reveals…
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
I argue that Einstein overlooked an important aspect of the relativity of time in never quite realizing his quest to embody Mach's principle in his theory of gravity. As a step towards that goal, I broaden the Strong Equivalence Principle…
Between 1905 and 1907, Einstein first tried to extend the special theory of relativity in such a way so as to explain gravitational phenomena. This was the most natural and simplest path to be taken. These investigations did not fit in with…
There exists some confusion, as evidenced in the literature, regarding the nature of the gravitational field in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. It is argued here the this confusion is a result of a change in interpretation of the…
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
The cosmological constant was proposed 100 years ago in order to make the model of static Universe, imagined then by most scientists, possible. Today it is the main candidate for the physical essence causing the observed accelerated…