At the beginning of 1915, Albert Einstein found himself engaging more and more

in politics; he started to protest the militarism that had plunged Europe into a devastating war. That year also marked a significant change in the path of his long life in science. Collaborating with mathematician Marcel Grossman, Einstein was scrambling to learn all he could about a new kind of geometry, heretofore almost entirely unknown to physicists, that might aid him in characterizing the bending of spacetime. The stakes, he realized, were vast: Could special relativity be generalized into a theory of gravity? Could the Newtonian cosmos of distant inverse-square forces be scrapped in favor of one based on the equivalence of mass and energy with fields of curved space and time? In November 1915, after the most intense intellectual struggle of his life, Einstein was finally able to reveal general relativity to the world. His gargantuan effort was no less than a triumph of theory, reason and abstraction.

This article was originally published with the title Einstein's Compass.

1 Comments

1. 1. Eureka999 04:54 PM 12/8/10

   Maybe so a triumph of abstraction. But not all together a triumph of reason and theory.
   
   There are problems with Einstein's general theory of relativity (GTR), that the classical relativistists are loathe to admit.
   
   One of those problems is that it clearly does not fit in with quantum mechanics, the mathematics has a quirk in it that predisposes to infinite density singularities, and it is fiendishly difficult to use.
   
   These problems can be largely overcome by using an advanced quantum version of gravity. The first stop is to convert it back to a force akin to that of the Newtionian force of gravity, that then dovetails in with the other forces of Nature that do have a quantum format, to produce an advanced quntum gravity.
   Available on line at aip.org.
   
   1). An advanced dynamic adaptation of Newtonian equations of gravity. Physics Essays 21: 222-228.
   
   2). String quintessence and the formulation of advanced quantum gravity. Physics Essays 22: 364-377
   
   
   
   
   

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