Related papers: Is general relativity `essentially understood' ?
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…
In these lectures general relativity is outlined as the classical field theory of gravity, emphasizing physical phenomena rather than mathematical formalism. Dynamical solutions representing traveling waves as well as stationary fields like…
The two defining features of the Einsteinian gravity are that it is self interactive as well as it links universally to all particles including zero mass particles. In the process of obtaining the Schwarzshild solution for gravitational…
Some principal problems of general relativity theory and attempts of their solution are discussed. The Poincare gauge theory of gravity as natural generalization of Einsteinian gravitation theory is considered. The changes of gravitational…
The gravitational field of an idealized plane-wave solution of the Maxwell equations can be described in closed form. After discussing this particular solution of the Einstein-Maxwell equations, the motion of neutral test particles, which…
The historical and conceptual foundations of General Relativity are revisited, putting the main focus on the physical meaning of the invariant ds, the Equivalence Principle, and the precise interpretation of spacetime geometry. It is argued…
In this chapter, we will review the field-theoretic treatment of General Relativity based on an effective field theory extension of the Einstein-Hilbert action. This pragmatic route to low-energy quantum effects in gravity critically…
General relativity can be formulated either as in its original geometrical version (Einstein, 1915) or as a field theory (Feynman, 1962). In the Feynman presentation of Einstein theory an hypothesis concerning the interaction of gravity to…
Einstein, when he began working on the general theory of relativity, believed that energy of any kind is the source of the gravitational field. Therefore, the energy of gravity, like any energy, must be the source of the field. It was…
Modifications of Einstein's theory of gravitation have been extensively considered in the past years, in connection to both cosmology and quantum gravity. Higher-curvature and higher-derivative gravity theories constitute the main examples…
One of the highlight of this note is that the author presents the relativistic gravity field that Einstein was looking for. The field is a byproduct of the matter in motion. This field can include both the discrete and continuous…
This paper analyzes the effective field theory perspective on modern physics through the lens of the quantum theory of gravitational interaction. The historical part argues that the search for a theory of quantum gravity stimulated the…
Einstein's special theory of relativity starts with assumptions about how observations conducted in relatively moving inertial frames must compare. From these assumptions, conclusions can be drawn regarding the laws of physics in any one…
The theory of evolution equations has been applied in various ways in general relativity. Following some general considerations about this, some illustrative examples of the use of ordinary differential equations in general relativity are…
Einstein's theory of General Relativity was proposed over 100 years ago and has successfully passed a large number of observational tests in weak gravitational fields. On the contrary, the strong field regime is still largely unexplored.…
Careful analysis of parametrized variational principles in mechanics and field theory leads to a generalization of Einstein theory that includes a cosmological stress tensor. This generalization also follows by restricting variations of the…
We provide an introduction to selected recent advances in the mathematical understanding of Einstein's theory of gravitation.
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was proposed a little over a hundred years back. It remained a bedrock of twentieth century physics right up to Quantum Field Theory. However, the failure over several decades to provide a unified…
We discuss dynamical aspects of gravitational plane waves in Einstein theory with massless scalar fields. The general analytic solution describes colliding gravitational waves with constant polarization, which interact with scalar waves…
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…