Einstein's manuscript of relativity goes on display
Digg
del.icio.us
Facebook
Reddit
Google
Stumble Upon
Fark
Newsvine
YahooBuzz
Bebo
Twitter
Independent Minds
RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS
Professor Hanoch Gutfreund points to the manuscript of Einstein's theory of general relativity
enlarge
The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang, yesterday went on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity, in which he demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time, is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of the association's 50th anniversary celebration.
Published in 1916, the theory was a pivotal breakthrough. "It changed our understanding of space, time, gravitation; really the entire universe," said Hanoch Gutfreund, chair of the Hebrew University's academic committee for the Albert Einstein Archives, a complete collection of Einstein's papers.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP logged and may be used to prevent further submission. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by the Independent Minds Terms of Service.
- Next Article In Science
- Print Article
- Email Article
-
Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Comments
Actually, no. It is "just" a mathematical formulation of the still mysterious force of "gravity" - how mass tells spacetime how to curve and how curved spacetime tells mass how to move. "Everything" would have to encompass at least Quantum Mechanics, Forces Other than Gravity and the Standard Model of Particles. There is still a long way to go to pack all that into a single description.
Now, can we have a scanned PDF please?
Without pics this is just a tease.
http://www.alberteinstein.info/gall
And yes, I'd like to see a pdf of the manuscript, too. Of course, it will be handwritten in German, so it may be a little difficult to read and translate. And the mathematics it no doubt uses, general tensor calculus (in which Einstein did his original calculations, before the methods of modern differential geomoetry and the calculus of forms overtook it), is not for the mathematical novice.
As many have pointed out, this isn't an explain-all set of explanations, but a heck of a starting point. There is always more to be discovered, and if you want to reach the stars, standing on the shoulders of giants before you is a heck of a start.
youtube converter
My German isn't good enough to be sure, but it would seem, contrary to the views of other's correspondence, that the papers are available on the net in digitized form.
In German.
There are also a number of explanations (of widely varying merit) in English, but you have to have some understanding of the theory before you may know which of the explanations is tripe. Sort of round and round in circles, really!