Related papers: Reason and Method in Einstein's Relativity
Soon after he proposed three classic observational tests for the general theory of relativity, Einstein realised that a consistent description of the universe as a whole provided another important challenge for the theory. In this essay, we…
The confrontation between General Relativity and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. The agreement between experiment and theory is numerically very impressive. However, some…
A hundred years ago, two British expeditions measured the deflection of starlight by the sun's gravitational field, confirming the prediction made by Einstein's General theory of Relativity. One hundred years later many physicists around…
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…
We will follow the growth of gravitational theory in Germany from 1915 to the 1990s, i.e., relativistic theories of gravitation, mainly Einstein's, as a branch of physics in the sense of social, more precisely institutional history. As…
Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR) provides the best available description of gravity. The recent detection of gravitational waves and the first picture of a black hole have provided spectacular confirmations of GR, as well as…
The Einsteinian Theory of Gravitation ("General Theory of Relativity") is founded essentially; on the reception that the geometrical properties of the 4-dimensional space-time continuum are defined from the matter in it. Contrary to this,…
These lectures notes contain an introduction to General Relativity. They are addressed to a general mathematical audience with no specific background in physics. The goal is to motivate and explain Einstein's theory of gravity and discuss…
The evolution of the methods used to find solutions of Einstein's field equations during the last 100 years is described. Early papers used assumptions on the coordinate forms of the metrics. Since the 1950s more invariant methods have been…
This paper completes a three-part study of Einstein's 1905 special relativity by reconstructing the experimental pressures that shaped his thinking from 1895 to June 1905. Following Stachel's historiographical line, I trace Einstein's path…
We present a theory of gravity based on Einstein's general relativity that is motivated by the paradoxes associated with time in relativistic rotating frames and certain exact solutions of Einstein's equations. We show that we can resolve…
Even if Einstein's General Relativity achieved a great success and overcame lots of experimental tests, it also showed some shortcomings and flaws which today advise theorists to ask if it is the definitive theory of gravity. In this…
This article is a partly pedagogical, partly historical and partly technical review of special relativity and its experimental foundations, in honor of the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.
General Relativity is today the best theory of gravity addressing a wide range of phenomena. Our understanding of physical laws, from cosmology to local scales, cannot be properly formulated without taking into account it. It is based on…
One of the most difficult questions in present-day physics concerns a fundamental theory of space, time, and matter that incorporates a consistent quantum description of gravity. There are various theoretical approaches to such a…
In a previous work we have shown that the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment in vacuum is deeply connected with the notion of time. The same is true for the the postulate of constancy of the two-way speed of light in vacuum in…
Gravitation, according to General Relativity, is an attribute of space-time's geometry and hence not a force in the Newtonian sense. This is a consequence of Einstein's equivalence principle, which so far passed all experimental tests with…
The relativistic time dilatation effect and Einstein's second postulate of special relativity are used to analyse train/embankment thought expriments, both Einstein's original one, and an extension where observers on two trains moving at…
In this paper we bring to light an hitherto undisclosed richness of this Theory, namely its admitting a consistent reformulation which is able to provide a unified scenario for all kinds of particles, be they lightlike or not. This result…
In this article, we discuss the idea of gravitational lensing, from a systematic, historical and didactic point of view. We show how the basic lensing equation together with the concepts of geometrical optics opens a space of implications…