Abstract
Meanwhile, a parallel story was unfolding in the rarified world of general relativity, which at the time was a branch of theoretical physics mainly isolated and mostly unknown to empirically driven astronomers working with their large telescopes, spectroscopes, and other real-world gadgets.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Einstein [47] (1917).
- 3.
Kosmologische Betractungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, in Einstein Papers, Vol. 6, Doc. 43.
- 4.
Duerbeck and Seitter [34], p. 233. Their important article provides a detailed and technical history of cosmology from 1917 into the 1930s, with a larger cast of characters. This is a significant supplement to the overview of most popular and quasi-popular accounts, such as this book.
- 5.
It was later pointed-out by Eddington that the balance between these two forces was actually unstable: any perturbing of the system would result either in a total collapse or a continuing expansion.
- 6.
Letter to Willem de Sitter, March 1917: Einstein Papers, Vol. 8, Doc. 311.
- 7.
“Do Gravitational Fields Play an Essential Part in the Structure of the Elementary Particles of Matter?,” pp. 191–198, in Einstein et al. [57] [1919], quotation on p. 193.
- 8.
Einstein Papers, Vol. 7, Doc. 4. The title of the paper is Prinzipielles zur Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, or “Fundamentals to the General Theory of Relativity.” The editors of the Papers strangely translate this as “On the Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity,” pp. 33–35 ET, which is nearly the identical translation used for the 1916 landmark summary paper, Einstein Papers, Vol. 6, Doc 30, Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, or “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” pp. 146–200 ET. This results in an unnecessary confusion between the two distinct papers, and I am perplexed as to why they did this, since the German titles were indeed different.
- 9.
Einstein Papers, Vol. 7, Doc. 4, pp. 33–35 ET.
- 10.
Kragh [122], p. 131.
- 11.
I mention the direct proportionality of this law, as distinct from the inverse-square law of gravity, but am not pursuing the mathematics of this any further.
References
Duerbeck, Hilmar W., and Waltraut C. Seitter. 2001. In Hubble’s shadow: early research on the expansion of the universe. In Miklós Konkoly Thege (1842–1916). 100 years of observational astronomy and astrophysics: a collection of papers on the history of observational astrophysics, ed. C. Sterken and J.B. Hearnshaw, 231–254. Brussels: VUB Press.
Einstein, Albert. 1954. Ideas and opinions (trans and revisions by Sonja Bargmann.) New York: Bonanza Books. Based, in part, on Mein Weltbild. Edited by Carl Seelig, and others (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934); plus a further edition by Seelig published in Switzerland in 1953, and other sources, such as Out of My Later Years (1950), cited above. Seelig’s 1934 German edition was translated by Alan Harris as The World As I See It (but recent editions, see above, leave-out the scientific essays). See 1934, above, for translations of some of the scientific articles. Many of the essays in Ideas and Opinions do not cite original sources. According to Schilpp (ed.), 1949, Volume II, p.737, Seelig “gives no clue as to where items were originally published; some may never have appeared in print previously.”
Einstein, Albert, H. A. Lorentz, H. Weyl, and H. Minkowski. 1923. The principle of relativity. New York: Dover Publications. This book contains the first English transitions of essential papers on relativity. The translations of Einstein’s papers in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein have supplanted some of these; in other cases the Einstein Papers merely reprint these translations of 1923.
Kragh, Helge L. 2007. Conceptions of cosmos: from myths to the accelerating universe: a history of cosmology. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Topper, D.R. (2013). Einstein 1917: Modern Cosmology Is Born. In: How Einstein Created Relativity out of Physics and Astronomy. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 394. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4782-5_21
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