Related papers: Einstein and Hilbert: The Creation of General Rela…
Relativity was Einstein's main research program and scientific project. It was an open-ended program that developed throughout Einstein's scientific career, giving rise to special relativity, general relativity and unified field theory. In…
General Relativity (GR) revolutionized the way we thought about gravity. After briefly describing the key successes of GR and its impact, I will discuss the major conceptual challenges it faces today. I conclude by outlining the prospective…
With the theory of general relativity, Einstein abolished the interpretation of gravitation as a force and associated it to the curvature of spacetime. Tensorial calculus and differential geometry are the mathematical resources necessary to…
General Relativity is considered to be so far the best gravitation theory. However it is quite hard to use in real situations. The root of these difficulties lays in the non-linearity of the theory. Our aim was not to linearize the theory,…
The mantra about gravitation as curvature is a misnomer. The curvature tensor for a standard of rest does not describe acceleration in a gravitational field but the \underline{gradient} of the acceleration (e.g. geodesic deviation). The…
The foundations of Einstein's first (1907) principle of equivalence are explored and their consequences are stated in terms of invariance under generalized Lorentz transformations, first explored by Hessenberg.
That the speed of light is always c=300,000km/s relative to any observer in nonaccelerating motion is one of the foundational concepts of physics. Experimentally this was supposed to have been first revealed by the 1887 Michelson-Morley…
The equivalence principle was formulated by Einstein in an attempt to extend the concept of inertial frames to accelerated frames, thereby bringing in gravity. In recent decades, it has been realised that gravity is linked not only with…
A century after its formulation by Einstein, it is time to incorporate special relativity early in the physics curriculum. The approach advocated here employs a simple algebraic extension of vector formalism that generates Minkowski…
Relying on a fundamental empirical identity of heavy and inertial mass it is proposed to bring a status of general theory of relativity (GTR) of Einstein up to a level of Unified Field Theory. To do this, a thoroughgoing revision of…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…
In the year 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers that raised him to a giant in the history of science of all times. These works encompass the photon hypothesis (for which he obtained the Nobel prize in 1921), his first two papers on…
As we mark the centenary of Albert Einstein's seminal contribution to both quantum mechanics and special relativity, we approach another anniversary--that of Einstein's foundation of the quantum theory of solids. But 100 years on, the same…
At the time it celebrates one century of existence, general relativity---Einstein's theory for gravitation---is given a companion theory: the so-called teleparallel gravity, or teleparallelism for short. This new theory is fully equivalent…
I discuss Einstein's path-breaking November 1915 General Relativity papers. I show that Einstein's field equations of November 25, 1915 with an additional term on the right hand side involving the trace of the energy-momentum tensor appear…
Einstein's theoretical analysis of mass-energy equivalence, already, at the time, experimentally evident in radioactive decays, in two papers published in 1905, as well as Planck's introduction, in 1906, of the concepts of relativistic…
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…
Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to…
The objective of this paper is not simply to present an historical overview of Einstein's cosmological considerations, but to discuss the central role they played in shaping the paradigm of relativistic cosmology. This, we'll show, was a…
Einstein presented the Hole Argument against General Covariance, understood as invariance with respect to a change of coordinates, as a consequence of his initial failure to obtain covariant equations that, in the weak static limit, contain…