Where Can I Find a Translated Copy of Einstein's Paper on General Relativity?

[kmchugh]

Hi Folks,

Where can I find a translated copy of Einstein's paper on GR? I found his 1905 paper on SR, but can't seem to locate his GR paper. Thanks in advance,

Kevin

 

[ZapperZ]

Have you checked the Einstein Papers Project?

http://www.einstein.caltech.edu/

Zz.

 

[SteamKing]

This is a translation of Einstein's paper which originally appeared in Annalen der Physik in 1916:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Foundation_of_the_Generalised_Theory_of_Relativity

There are also links to copies of the paper in the original German.

You should be aware that Einstein wrote several papers prior to 1916 where he develops some of the mathematics behind GR. These earlier papers show how Einstein's thinking on the math evolved and how some mistakes were pointed out to him by Levi-Civita, among others.

 

[kmchugh]

Thanks guys, I am currently learning the differential geometry necessary to understand his works. As an undergrad, we were only taught the bare basics to get through QM. I've been out of school 30 years now, and I want to try to understand QM, GR, and cosmology more thoroughly. This site is a great find. I look forward to learning a lot in here.

 

[jtbell]

I think most of the "pros" here would say that if you're just starting to learn GR, it's better to do it from a modern textbook than from Einstein's original papers. Those papers are probably best used for supplemental reading for historical interest, after you've learned the basics elsewhere.

 

[kmchugh]

Unfortunately I lost most of my old texts in a flood in TX. I am considering getting Griffith's text on QM. If I remember correctly, we didn't learn much about Minkowski space or the Poincare group in undergrad QM. IIRC, we focused on BBR, the Bohr model, the Schroedinger equation. The grand finale was the 4 particle system of hydrogen gas. There was little attention paid to differential geometry.

 

[SteamKing]

jtbell is probably right about using a modern text to learn GR. Einstein only learned the math necessary for GR after he had written his paper on SR in 1905. He learned about differential geometry from his old classmate Marcel Grossman and he was urged to employ tensors by Levi-Civita, which were just then coming into mathematical use. In several of his early papers on the development of his ideas on GR, Einstein got some of this 'new math' wrong, which he corrected in later works. A modern text should present GR as 'debugged' after almost a century of review by other scientists. Later, when you have an understanding of the theory, you can always go back to Einstein's papers to trace his thinking while he developed GR.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity

 

[kmchugh]

Thanks guys, your advice is well taken. Can you recommend a good modern text for GR?