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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.
To exert an influence, something, such as a wave or particle, must travel through the space between the two points, carrying the influence. The special theory of relativity limits the maximum speed at which causal influence can travel to the speed of light, . Therefore, the principle of locality implies that an event at one point cannot cause a ...
In contrast to all other modern theories of fundamental interactions, general relativity is a classical theory: it does not include the effects of quantum physics. The quest for a quantum version of general relativity addresses one of the most fundamental open questions in physics.
The special principle of relativity states that physical laws should be the same in every inertial frame of reference, but that they may vary across non-inertial ones. This principle is used in both Newtonian mechanics and the theory of special relativity. Its influence in the latter is so strong that Max Planck named the theory after the ...
The idea that special relativity depended only on two postulates, both of which seemed to follow from the theory and experiment of the day, was one of the most compelling arguments for the correctness of the theory (Einstein 1912: "This theory is correct to the extent to which the two principles upon which it is based are correct.
The extended form by Albert Einstein requires special relativity to also hold in free fall and requires the weak equivalence to be valid everywhere. This form was a critical input for the development of the theory of general relativity. The strong form requires Einstein's form to work for stellar objects.
The history of special relativity consists of many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. It culminated in the theory of special relativity proposed by Albert Einstein and subsequent work of Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others.
In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory of the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein 's 1905 paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies , the theory is presented as being based on just two postulates : [ p 1 ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ]