The Journey Toward General Relativity: Part 2
NOV 21, 2016
Part 2: 1912–1913
Image by Matt Payne
This is the second part in a series outlining Albert Einstein’s development of the general theory of relativity. In Part 1 we saw that by mid-1911 Einstein1
- knew that, in general, the equivalence principle held only locally, and likewise the Lorentz transformation, implying the need of a larger invariance group (thus, physical laws more complex than Maxwell’s equations for electrodynamics were needed for gravitation);
- had confidence in an action principle for a particle falling freely in a gravitational field;
- realized the gravitational field equations must be nonlinear because gravitational field energy is a source of gravitation;
- had calculated gravitational redshift and predicted 0.83" deflection of a light ray grazing the Sun, essentially the same as the Newtonian prediction.
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