Topic
standard and classical physics theory of gravity and space
No public IJR answers mention general relativity yet. As people ask about it and share their answers, they'll appear here.
Not who you're looking for? Others named general relativity: 1984 graduate textbook by Robert M. Wald
“Although Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that there can exist... a singularity in our past, it provides no reason why... a creation out of nothing should occur. ...There are ways of avoiding... a past singularity. If gravity were ever to become a repulsive... force in the distant past then the Universe need not have experienced a singular beginning.”
“Einstein's general theory of relativity... was needed not because of conspicuous failures of Newton's theory... but because of inconsistencies between it and the requirements of electromagnetic theory, which Einstein had revised earlier in his special theory of relativity.”
“If I were giving this lecture fifty years from now, the word "gravitation" would be as old-fashioned as the word "phlogiston" is to us. Relativity has certainly demoted gravitation as a real explanation, just as Priestley's and Lavoisier's analyses and decoding of chemical reactions destroyed the word "phlogiston."”
“Up to the early 1950s, general relativity was a little-frequented subject, amongst physicists—a theory that had to be praised, but that could be safely ignored. ...Its supporting evidence was sparse, questionable, and unstable: essentially it reduced to the changing experimental verdicts on the three notorious tests.”
“There was difficulty reconciling the Newtonian theory of gravitation with its instantaneous propagation of forces with the requirements of special relativity; and Einstein working on this difficulty was led to a generalization of his relativity—which was probably the greatest scientific discovery that was ever made.”
“The great triumph of the theory of relativity lies in its absorbing the universal force of gravitation into one geometric structure... Einstein's achievements would be substantially as great even though it were not for... observational tests.”
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