
The most beautiful theory - prostoalex
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21679172-century-ago-albert-einstein-changed-way-humans-saw-universe-his-work?
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kailuowang
for anyone who is interested in Einstein's ideas/theory and philosophy within
the context of social and science history, there is an wonderful mooc offered
by Peter Galison from Harvard.

[https://www.edx.org/course/einstein-revolution-harvardx-
emc2...](https://www.edx.org/course/einstein-revolution-harvardx-emc2x)

Highly recommended.

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sohkamyung
This has probably being said many times before, but Einstein's book on
Relativity is still worth reading as an introduction to his ideas on Special
and General Relativity. A 100th Anniversary Edition has been released [1]
which includes extra commentary that acts as a reading companion and includes
a look at the various foreign-language editions of his book that makes you
realise just how far his ideas spread.

[1] "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory", 100th Anniversary
edition by Albert Einstein, With Commentaries and Background Material by
Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn [
[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10434.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10434.html)
]

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astazangasta
One interesting notion exemplified in this article is the importance of
intuition in science. There is a lot of noise made about empiricism and
accumulation of data - but scientific endeavor necessarily begins with a
hypothesis, an act of pure intuition. In this case, Einstein was acting on the
data and inferences from well-known experiments. What he added was only a new
understanding. This is perhaps the most visible and celebrated example of this
sort of intuitive leap, but really every scientific endeavor must contain this
kind of thinking.

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figure8
I have a question. Given an u derstanding of special relativity plus
Einstein's equivalence principle, can one derive the Ricci curvature
formulation of GR? By that I mean, is the math of GR an inevitable consequence
of those assumptions?

~~~
hansen
That gives you only the equation of motions for a test particle, i.e. the
geodesic equation. The field equations are another thing. I think historically
there was a lot of guess work. But using that the sources of the field are the
energy/momentum density you can make them plausible: looking for a divergence
free 2-tensor that depends on the curvature the Einstein tensor is easiest
choice. The coupling constant can be determined by looking for the non-
relativistic limit which must be identical to Newtons law.

On the other hand, the Einstein-Hilbert action[1] is so beautiful it just has
to be right :) It simply says that the the solutions to the field equations
are the stationary points of the averaged scalar curvature.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein-
Hilbert_action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein-Hilbert_action)

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ant6n
full title: General relativity

The most beautiful theory

A century ago Albert Einstein changed the way humans saw the universe. His
work is still offering new insights today

