Road to Relativity: The History and Meaning of Einstein's 'The Foundation of General Relativity' Featuring the Original Manuscript of Einstein's Masterpiece. Foreword by John Stachel - Hardcover

Gutfreund, Hanoch; Renn, Jürgen

 
9780691162539: Road to Relativity: The History and Meaning of Einstein's 'The Foundation of General Relativity' Featuring the Original Manuscript of Einstein's Masterpiece. Foreword by John Stachel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0691162530 ISBN 13: 9780691162539
Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

This richly annotated facsimile edition of The Foundation of General Relativity introduces a new generation of readers to Albert Einstein's theory of gravitation. Written in 1915, this remarkable document is a watershed in the history of physics and an enduring testament to the elegance and precision of Einstein's thought. Presented here is a beautiful facsimile of Einstein's original handwritten manuscript, along with its English translation and insightful page-by-page commentary that places the text in historical and scientific context.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hanoch Gutfreund is professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is also the academic director of the Albert Einstein Archives. Jürgen Renn is a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The feeling a physicist has in reading Einstein's handwritten manuscript on general relativity must be like what a pianist would feel upon seeing a draft of Bach'sGoldberg Variations. What kind of human creativity can produce something like this? Gutfreund and Renn provide the context for the paper, and the English translation enables readers not fluent in German to see it as a whole. This book is a little treasure."--Jeremy Bernstein, Aspen Center for Physics

"We have in The Road to Relativity an approachable, precise, and riveting account of one of the great intellectual voyages of the last hundred and fifty years. I commend this book to anyone fascinated by gravity and the shape of the universe, to be sure, but also to anyone passionate about one of the great odysseys of modern science."--Peter Galison, Harvard University

"Gutfreund and Renn have compiled a wonderful book, a real primer to Einstein's long and complex journey to the general theory of relativity. In this well written distillation of several decades of historical-scientific scholarship, we find not only Einstein's own papers, concisely and clearly explained, but also a rich tapestry of the contextual background to the revolutionary transformations in theoretical physics initiated by an entire generation of scientists in the early twentieth century."--Diana Kormos Buchwald, Einstein Papers Project, Caltech

"This book takes you on a wonderful journey of discovery. Its centerpiece is Einstein’s handwritten exposition of the general theory of relativity, written shortly after the decisive breakthrough of November 1915. In their splendid introduction and insightful commentary, Gutfreund and Renn tell the story of how Einstein found his new theory of space-time and gravity, making both the theory itself and Einstein’s arduous path to it come alive for general readers."--Michel Janssen, University of Minnesota

"This is a lovely book and an excellent way to mark the centennial of Einstein’s general relativity. The facsimile reproduction of Einstein’s manuscript is wonderful to behold, and Gutfreund and Renn have done a superb job of guiding nonspecialists through Einstein’s argument and placing the work in a broader intellectual and historical context."--David Kaiser, author ofHow the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

"The centenary of Einstein’s theory of gravitation is a fitting moment to recommend one of the greatest landmarks in the history of physics. The historical introduction and page-by-page annotations provide a careful narrative of Einstein’s path from special to general relativity."--Michael D. Gordin, author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War

Aus dem Klappentext

"The feeling a physicist has in reading Einstein's handwritten manuscript on general relativity must be like what a pianist would feel upon seeing a draft of Bach'sGoldberg Variations. What kind of human creativity can produce something like this? Gutfreund and Renn provide the context for the paper, and the English translation enables readers not fluent in German to see it as a whole. This book is a little treasure."--Jeremy Bernstein, Aspen Center for Physics

"We have in The Road to Relativity an approachable, precise, and riveting account of one of the great intellectual voyages of the last hundred and fifty years. I commend this book to anyone fascinated by gravity and the shape of the universe, to be sure, but also to anyone passionate about one of the great odysseys of modern science."--Peter Galison, Harvard University

"Gutfreund and Renn have compiled a wonderful book, a real primer to Einstein's long and complex journey to the general theory of relativity. In this well written distillation of several decades of historical-scientific scholarship, we find not only Einstein's own papers, concisely and clearly explained, but also a rich tapestry of the contextual background to the revolutionary transformations in theoretical physics initiated by an entire generation of scientists in the early twentieth century."--Diana Kormos Buchwald, Einstein Papers Project, Caltech

"This book takes you on a wonderful journey of discovery. Its centerpiece is Einstein s handwritten exposition of the general theory of relativity, written shortly after the decisive breakthrough of November 1915. In their splendid introduction and insightful commentary, Gutfreund and Renn tell the story of how Einstein found his new theory of space-time and gravity, making both the theory itself and Einstein s arduous path to it come alive for general readers."--Michel Janssen, University of Minnesota

"This is a lovely book and an excellent way to mark the centennial of Einstein s general relativity. The facsimile reproduction of Einstein s manuscript is wonderful to behold, and Gutfreund and Renn have done a superb job of guiding nonspecialists through Einstein s argument and placing the work in a broader intellectual and historical context."--David Kaiser, author ofHow the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

"The centenary of Einstein s theory of gravitation is a fitting moment to recommend one of the greatest landmarks in the history of physics. The historical introduction and page-by-page annotations provide a careful narrative of Einstein s path from special to general relativity."--Michael D. Gordin, author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War

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The Road to Relativity

By Hanoch Gutfreund, Jürgen Renn

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-16253-9

Contents

A Brief Note on the Publication of This Work MENACHEM BEN-SASSON AND MARTIN STRATMANN, xi, 
Foreword JOHN STACHEL, xiii, 
Preface, xvii, 
The Charm of a Manuscript, 1, 
Einstein's Intellectual Odyssey to General Relativity, 7, 
The Annotated Manuscript, 37, 
Notes on the Annotation Pages, 141, 
Postscript: The Drama Continues ..., 149, 
A Chronology of the Genesis of General Relativity and Its Formative Years, 159, 
Physicists, Mathematicians, and Philosophers Relevant to Einstein's Thinking, 165, 
Further Reading, 179, 
English Translation of "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity", 183, 
English Translation of "Hamilton's Principle and the General Theory of Relativity", 227, 
Index, 233,


CHAPTER 1

EINSTEIN'S INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY TO GENERAL RELATIVITY


Einstein's famous 1905 papers shook the foundations of classical physics. They challenged the idea of light as a wave, gave striking proof for the existence of atoms, led to a new understanding of space and time, and identified mass as a form of energy. The revolution of space and time that started in 1905 with Einstein's formulation of the special theory of relativity was soon seen to be incomplete. Attempts to fit Newton's well-established law of gravity into the framework of this theory did not succeed, at least not without giving up basic principles of mechanics. Although this problem did not lead to urgent empirical queries, it led Einstein in 1907 to question the special theory's concepts of space and time and caused him to continue the revolution with his 1915 theory of general relativity.

The following remarks introduce the reader to the development of Einstein's ideas and attitudes as he struggled for eight years to achieve a theory of general relativity that would meet the physical and mathematical requirements laid down at the outset. Many of the points discussed here will appear again in the annotations to the specific pages of the manuscript. However, before getting there, we present the whole story as it evolved, with all its dilemmas, wrong paths, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings, to which Einstein himself admitted as he progressed on the bumpy road to his final goal.


A TALE OF THREE CITIES: PRAGUE, ZURICH, BERLIN

The Einstein specialist John Stachel refers to the development of general relativity as "a drama in three acts." According to this scenario, the first act occurred in 1907 with the formulation of the basic idea to which Einstein referred as the "equivalence principle." The second act took place in 1912, when Einstein realized that the gravitational field is mathematically represented by 10 functions of spacetime coordinates, which form the metric tensor associated with the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime. The third act, with its "happy end," occurred in November 1915, when Einstein formulated the gravitational field equations and explained the anomalous precession of the perihelion of the planet Mercury.

We propose another script for this dramatic development, which explores its geography. Einstein conceived the notion of the equivalence principle when he was still employed at the patent office in Bern, and he published it in a review article on special relativity in 1907. In that article Einstein also discussed some of its immediate implications, such as the bending of light rays in a gravitational field and the effect of gravitation on the pace of clocks. This can be viewed as a prelude to the real "drama," which began in 1911 when he went to Prague. Then, after a pause of four years, Einstein resumed his interest in gravitation and pursued it intensively—almost exclusively and sometimes obsessively—until his triumphal achievement. It is to this period that we refer as a "Tale of Three Cities" Each of these cities served as a stage for a specific chapter in this development. Each one provided a different social and political environment, and each was characterized by a different phase in his family life. How these circumstances related to his scientific work is discussed in several Einstein biographies.

Prague In 1909, Einstein was appointed extraordinary professor at the University of Zurich. For the first time he held a position that carried certain academic and public prestige. Less than six months later, he was offered the even more prestigious position of full professor at the German part of the Charles University of Prague when a vacancy in theoretical physics opened up there. Einstein's candidacy to this position was most strongly supported by Anton Lampa, a professor of experimental physics and ardent follower of Mach, who hoped that Einstein would further promote Mach's ideas.

After some delay and despite the reluctance of his wife Mileva to leave Zurich, where she felt more comfortable, and despite appeals of students to the authorities of the university to make every effort to keep him in Zurich, Einstein accepted the offer and went to Prague in April, 1911.

In Prague, Einstein wrote 11 scientific papers, 6 of which were devoted to relativity. In the first of these papers, published in 1911, he discussed the bending of light and the gravitational redshift, which he had already discovered in 1907, but now Einstein explored them as observable effects. In the Prague papers, he focused on developing a consistent theory of the static gravitational field based on the equivalence principle. Just like Newton's theory of gravity, it involved a gravitational potential represented by a single scalar function, now given by a variable speed of light. Nevertheless, some basic features of the final theory of general relativity had already been conceived by then. Among them was the understanding that the source of the gravitational potential is not only the mass of concrete bodies but also the equivalent mass of the energy of the gravitational field itself. However, until the end of this period Einstein still assumed that the gravitational potential was represented by a single function—the space-dependent speed of light—and the theory he developed was restricted to a static gravitational field.

It is interesting to note that Einstein's work on gravitation in Prague was done to a large extent within the context of a controversy with the physicist Max Abraham, famous for his contributions to electrodynamics and electron theory. Abraham was the first to publish, in January 1912, a complete theory of the gravitational field formulated within the framework of Minkowski's four-dimensional spacetime. At first, Einstein was impressed but then reacted skeptically. To his friend Besso he wrote: "At first (for 14 days) I too was completely bluffed by the beauty and simplicity of his formulas." Yet, in the ensuing controversy both Abraham and Einstein developed important insights.

In a foreword to the Czech edition of 1923 of his famous little popular book "About the Special and General Theory of Relativity in Plain Terms," Einstein refers to his work in Prague:

I am pleased that this small book ... should now appear in the native language of the country in which I found the necessary concentration for developing the basic idea of the general theory of relativity which I had already conceived in 1908 [he must have meant 1907]. In the quiet rooms of the Institute of Theoretical Physics...

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Verlag
Princeton University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0691162530
ISBN 13 
9780691162539
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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