Christoffel symbols – My Albert Einstein Posts

מאמר שלי על דרכו של איינשטיין לתורת היחסות הכללית: אודיסאת איינשטיין ליחסות הכללית

“Einstein’s Odyssey to General Relativity”, Scientific American Israel

את המונח “אודיסאה” ליחסות הכללית טבע פרופ’ ג’ון סטצ’ל מאוניברסיטת בוסטון והוא מייצג את המסע המפרך של איינשטיין בדרכו ליחסות הכללית. ראו המאמר של סטצ’ל למטה

Odyssey to general relativity is John Stachel’s memorable phraseology. See:

Stachel, John (1979). “Einstein’s Odyssey: His Journey from Special to General Relativity”. In Einstein from B to Z, 2002.

I am sorry but this piece is in Hebrew. You can read my book General Relativity Conflict and Rivalries, my papers on Einstein and general relativity and a short summary below.

מפייסבוק: מארחים את ד”ר גלי וינשטיין לדבר על איינשטיין

SF1

My drawing of Einstein: האיור שלי של איינשטיין

איינשטיין צעיר

And the original (I tried as hard as I could to draw a young Einstein…): המקור

תמונה1

The article discusses the following topics:

1907. The Happiest thought of my life.

1907-1911. The equivalence principle and elevator experiments.

1911. Deflection of light and explaining deflection of light using an elevator thought experiment.

1911-1912 (1916). The disk thought experiment, gravitational time dilation and gravitational redshift.

1912. The disk thought experiment and non-Euclidean geometry.

1912. Einstein to Marcel Grossmann: “Grossmann, you must help me or else I’ll go crazy!”. Grossmann searched the literature, and brought the works of Bernhard Riemann, Gregorio Curbastro-Ricci, Tullio Levi-Civita and Elwin Bruno Christoffel to Einstein’s attention. With Grossmann’s help Einstein searched for gravitational field equations for the metric tensor in the Zurich Notebook.

1913-1914. The Entwurf theory. In 1913, Einstein and Michele Besso both tried to solve the new Entwurf field equations to find the perihelion advance of Mercury.

October 1915. Einstein realizes there are problems with his 1914 Entwurf theory. November 1915. Einstein’s competition with David Hilbert.

November 1915. Four ground-breaking papers: Einstein presents the field equations of general relativity, finds the advance of the perihelion of Mercury and predicts that a ray of light passing near the Sun would undergo a deflection of amount 1.7 arc seconds.

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My new paper shows that a correction of one mistake was crucial for Einstein’s pathway to the first version of the 1915 general theory of relativity, but also might have played a role in obtaining the final version of Einstein’s 1915 field equations. In 1914 Einstein wrote the equations for conservation of energy-momentum for matter, and established a connection between these equations and the components of the gravitational field. He showed that a material point in gravitational fields moves on a geodesic line in space-time, the equation of which is written in terms of the Christoffel symbols. By November 4, 1915, Einstein found it advantageous to use for the components of the gravitational field, not the previous equation, but the Christoffel symbols. He corrected the 1914 equations of conservation of energy-momentum for matter. Einstein had already basically possessed the field equations in 1912 together with his mathematician friend Marcel Grossman, but because he had not recognized the formal importance of the Christoffel symbols as the components of the gravitational field, he could “not obtain a clear overview”. Finally, considering the energy-momentum conservation equations for matter, an important similarity between equations suggests that, this equation could have assisted Einstein in obtaining the final form of the field equations (the November 25, 1915 ones) that were generally covariant.

My new paper on general relativity

Tag: Christoffel symbols

אודיסאת איינשטיין ליחסות הכללית Einstein’s Odyssey to General Relativity

Einstein and 1915 General Relativity