Related papers: Some Remarks on Dirac's Contributions to General R…
The nature of gravity is fundamental to understand the scaffolding of the Universe and its evolution. Einstein's general theory of relativity has been scrutinized for over ninety five years and shown to describe accurately all phenomena…
This is an English translation of the Italian version of an encyclopedia chapter that appeared in the Italian Encyclopedia of the Physical Sciences, edited by Bruno Bertotti (1994). Following requests from colleagues we have decided to make…
We work on the Lagrangian and the Hamiltonian formulations of the Palatini action. In the Lagrangian formulation, we find that we need to assume the metric compatibility and the torsion zero or to assume the tetrad compatibility to describe…
Einstein regarded as one of the triumphs of his 1915 theory of gravity --- the general theory of relativity --- that it vindicated the action--reaction principle, while Newtonian mechanics as well as his 1905 special theory of relativity…
The confrontation between Einstein's gravitation theory and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. Experiment and theory agree at the 10^{-3} level. All the basic structures of…
This is a substantially expanded version of a chapter-contribution to "The Springer Handbook of Spacetime", edited by Abhay Ashtekar and Vesselin Petkov, published by Springer Verlag in 2014. This contribution introduces the reader to the…
We study the Dirac equation minimally coupled to general relativity using quantum field theory and the semiclassical gravity approximation. Previous studies of the Einstein-Dirac system did not quantize the Dirac field and required multiple…
This is the first of a couple of papers in which, by exploiting the capabilities of the Hamiltonian approach to general relativity, we get a number of technical achievements that are instrumental both for a disclosure of \emph{new} results…
This is a review of the chrono-geometrical structure of special and general relativity with a special emphasis on the role of non-inertial frames and of the conventions for the synchronization of distant clocks. ADM canonical metric and…
This article reviews the biography of the Swiss mathematician Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936) and his contributions to the emergence of the general theory of relativity. The first part is his biography, while the second part reviews his…
Gravitoelectromagnetic analogies are somewhat ubiquitous in General Relativity, and they are often used to explain peculiar effects of Einstein's theory of gravity in terms of familiar results from classical electromagnetism. Perhaps, the…
A canonical analysis of RG improved action of the Einstein-Hilbert functional is performed. The gravitational and cosmological constants as function of the space-time coordinates are treated as external non-geometrical fields. Dirac's…
We attempt to see how closely we can formally obtain the planetary and light path equations of General Relativity by employing certain operations on the familiar Newtonian equation. This article is intended neither as an alternative to nor…
This is a brief introduction to general relativity, designed for both students and teachers of the subject. While there are many excellent expositions of general relativity, few adequately explain the geometrical meaning of the basic…
We perform a brief review on Dirac's procedure applied to the well known Einstein's linearized gravity in $N > 2$ dimensions. Considering it as a gauge theory and therefore the manifestation of second class constraints in analogy with the…
Einstein's revolutionary light quantum hypothesis of 1905 and his further contributions to quantum theory are reviewed.
Einstein's theory of general relativity describes gravity as the interaction of particles with space-time geometry, as opposed to interacting with a physical fluid, as in the old gravitational aether theories. Moreover, any theoretical…
The analytic hyperbolic geometric viewpoint of Einstein's special theory of relativity is presented.
This article discusses aspects of Dirac's work that are less familiar.
There is a myth that Einstein's discovery of general relativity was due to his following beautiful mathematics to discover new insights about nature. I argue that this is an incorrect reading of the history and that what Einstein did was to…