Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Two years after completing work on what is now called special relativity, Einstein embarked on an eight-year long journey towards what he called the general theory of relativity. Motivated by the search for a way to incorporate gravitation into his theory, the journey was marked by three crucial steps:
1907 -- formulation of the equivalence principle: gravitation and acceleration are two sides of the same coin
1912 -- replacing the Newtonian scalar gravitational potential in a fixed space and time with a dynamical space-time
1915 -- formulation of generally covariant field equations for the space-time metric field.
The talk will describe Einstein's intellectual odyssey, discuss some reasons why the journey was so long, and draw some lessons for the current quest for a quantum theory of gravity.
The University of Texas at Austin