The Formative Years of Relativity

"The authors paint a detailed but dynamic recounting of how general relativity became what it is today." * Nature Astronomy * "Gutfreund and Renn . . . combine years of Einstein scholarship with readability and insight." * Science *

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. Jurgen Renn is a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His books include The Genesis of General Relativity.

Foreword Diana Kormos Buchwald ix Preface xiii I Preliminaries 1 1 Introduction 3 2 Einstein's First Trip to America 11 3 Structure and Contents of The Meaning of Relativity 17 II The Emerging World of General Relativity 23 1 Physics and Geometry 25 2 The Principles of General Relativity 34 3 The First Solutions and the Challenge of Their Interpretation 46 4 Einstein and the Astronomers 52 5 The Genesis of Relativistic Cosmology 69 6 The Controversy over Gravitational Waves 94 7 Philosophical Debates on General Relativity 106 8 The Quest for a Unified Field Theory 122 9 Early Monographs on Relativity 140 10 Beyond the Formative Years 155 III Einstein's Book with the Appendixes 159 1 Space and Time in Pre-relativity Physics 161 2 The Theory of Special Relativity 184 3 The General Theory of Relativity 215 4 The General Theory of Relativity (Continued) 239 5 Appendix for the Second Edition: On the "Cosmologic Problem" 269 6 Appendix II (PUP 4th edition, 1953): Generalization of Gravitation Theory 293 7 Appendix II (PUP 5th edition, 1956): Relativistic Theory of the Non-symmetric Field 326 IV The Popular Lectures 361 1 Introductory Remarks 363 2 Einstein's Lectures 366 V Biographical Notes on the Protagonists of the Formative Years 387 Index 409