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General relativity has emerged as a highly successful model of gravitation and cosmology, which has so far passed many unambiguous observational and experimental tests. However, there are strong indications that the theory is incomplete. [210] The problem of quantum gravity and the question of the reality of spacetime singularities remain open ...
These three experiments justified adopting general relativity over Newton's theory and, incidentally, over a number of alternatives to general relativity that had been proposed. Further tests of general relativity include precision measurements of the Shapiro effect or gravitational time delay for light, measured in 2002 by the Cassini space probe.
General relativity is a theory of gravitation developed by Einstein in the years 1907–1915. The development of general relativity began with the equivalence principle , under which the states of accelerated motion and being at rest in a gravitational field (for example, when standing on the surface of the Earth) are physically identical.
In general relativity, the metric tensor (in this context often abbreviated to simply the metric) is the fundamental object of study.The metric captures all the geometric and causal structure of spacetime, being used to define notions such as time, distance, volume, curvature, angle, and separation of the future and the past.
Because General Relativity is a diffeomorphism invariant theory, it has an infinite continuous group of symmetries rather than a finite-parameter group of symmetries, and hence has the wrong group structure to guarantee a conserved energy. Noether's theorem has been influential in inspiring and unifying various ideas of mass, system energy, and ...
Numerical relativity is the sub-field of general relativity which seeks to solve Einstein's equations through the use of numerical methods. Finite difference , finite element and pseudo-spectral methods are used to approximate the solution to the partial differential equations which arise.
General relativity uses the mathematics of differential geometry and tensors in order to describe gravitation as an effect of the geometry of spacetime. Einstein based this new theory on the general principle of relativity, and he named the theory after the underlying principle.
In Einstein's theories, the ideas of absolute time and space were superseded by the notion of spacetime in special relativity, and curved spacetime in general relativity. Absolute simultaneity refers to the concurrence of events in time at different locations in space in a manner agreed upon in all frames of reference.