Where did General Relativity Come From

[Galadirith]

Hi guys, I have been wondering where did General Relativity actually start. I know obviously that it came a while after 'ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES' and Einstein was considering adding various things to his theory of SR. I hope I'm not naive in thinking this But was there a paper like 'On The..' where he describes his findings. Where where his field equations proposed? I've search everywhere but strangely I can't find any reference to and of his publications after 1905. Thanks guys :-)

 

[jaguar7]

The principle of relativity is a general principle that must be described in order to describe how *special relativity* differs from normal interact, mainly in terms of the "speed" of light.

Although, I admit, I'm not quite sure if that gives you a complete answer that you're looking for, does it?

 

[DeShark]

His paper was published in 1915, called "Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation (The Field Equations of Gravitation)"

Basically, General relativity comes by extension of special relativity. One supposes that experiments in an accelerating reference frame are indistringuishible from those in a gravitational field. The rest sort of... falls out. almost.

 

[Ich]

The complete theory can be found here:http://www.Alberteinstein.info/gallery/gtext3.html"
Einstein's startig point is outlined http://www.soso.ch/wissen/hist/SRT/E-1907.pdf" (German only).
Wiki hosts a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein#Journal_articles".

 

[Mentz114]

It seems obvious now, that because accelerating bodies have curved worldlines in space-time diagrams, we can straighten those lines by transforming the axes somehow. This means instead of the flat space metric ( -1, 1, 1, 1) we use a general one, g_ab where each component can depend on position and/or time.

After that ( to quote DeShark) "The rest sort of... falls out".