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Einstein himself considered the introduction of the cosmological constant in his 1917 paper founding cosmology as a "blunder". [3] The theory of general relativity predicted an expanding or contracting universe, but Einstein wanted a static universe which is an unchanging three-dimensional sphere, like the surface of a three-dimensional ball in four dimensions.
Einstein excelled at physics and mathematics from an early age, and soon acquired the mathematical expertise normally only found in a child several years his senior. He began teaching himself algebra, calculus and Euclidean geometry when he was twelve; he made such rapid progress that he discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem ...
Albert Einstein, who had developed his theory of general relativity in 1915, initially denied the possibility of black holes, [4] even though they were a genuine implication of the Schwarzschild metric, obtained by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, the first known non-trivial exact solution to Einstein's field equations. [1]
It was also claimed that special relativity cannot handle acceleration, which would lead to contradictions in some situations. However, this assessment is not correct, since acceleration actually can be described in the framework of special relativity (see Acceleration (special relativity), Proper reference frame (flat spacetime), Hyperbolic motion, Rindler coordinates, Born coordinates).
When studying and formulating Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, various mathematical structures and techniques are utilized. The main tools used in this geometrical theory of gravitation are tensor fields defined on a Lorentzian manifold representing spacetime. This article is a general description of the mathematics of general ...
"A theory is scientific if and only if it divides the class of basic statements into the following two non-empty sub-classes: (a) the class of all those basic statements with which it is inconsistent, or which it prohibits—this is the class of its potential falsifiers (i.e., those statements which, if true, falsify the whole theory), and (b ...
Albert Einstein presented the theories of special relativity and general relativity in publications that either contained no formal references to previous literature, or referred only to a small number of his predecessors for fundamental results on which he based his theories, most notably to the work of Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz for special relativity, and to the work of David ...
Albert Einstein's discovery of the gravitational field equations of general relativity and David Hilbert's almost simultaneous derivation of the theory using an elegant variational principle, [B 1]: 170 during a period when the two corresponded frequently, has led to numerous historical analyses of their interaction.