Related papers: How Were the Hilbert--Einstein Equations Discovere…
Some highlights of the priority in the discovery of the gravitational field equations are given.
We study the pages in Albert Einstein's 1916 landmark paper in the Annalen der Physik where he derived his field equations for gravity. Einstein made two heuristic and physically insightful steps. The first was to obtain the field equations…
A succinct chronology is given around Nov 1915, when the explicit field equations of General Relativity have been found. Evidence, unearthed by D.Wuensch, that a decisive document of Hilbert has been mutilated in recent years with the…
The content of Einstein's theory of gravitation is encoded in the properties of the solutions to his field equations. There has been obtained a wealth of information about these solutions in the ninety years the theory has been around. It…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Einstein's biographer Albrecht F\"olsing explained: Einstein presented his field equations on November 25, 1915, but six days earlier, on November 20, Hilbert had derived the identical field equations for which Einstein had been searching…
We review and strengthen the arguments given by Einstein to derive his first gravitational field equation for static fields and show that, although it was ultimately rejected, it follows from General Relativity (GR) for negligible pressure.…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
More than thirty years passed since the first discoveries of various aspects of integrability of the symmetry reduced vacuum Einstein equations and electrovacuum Einstein - Maxwell equations were made and gave rise to constructions of…
It took eight years after Einstein announced the basic physical ideas behind the relativistic gravity theory before the proper mathematical formulation of general relativity was mastered. The efforts of the greatest physicist and of the…
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…
Schwarzschild's solution of Einstein's field equations in vacuum can be written in many different forms. Unfortunately Schwarzschild's own original form is less nice looking and simple than that latter derived by Droste and Hilbert. We…
Hilbert's paper on ``The Foundations of Physics (First Communication),'' is now primarily known for its parallel publication of essentially the same gravitational field equations of general relativity which Einstein published in a note on…
The Einstein equations for static gravitational field depend on energy density and pressure. So one may expect that solutions should depend on two parameters: mass and its analogue originated from pressure. Yet the Schwarzschild solution…
The existence of gravitational radiation is a natural prediction of any relativistic description of the gravitational interaction. In this chapter, we focus on gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity.…