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How did Albert Einstein develop general relativity between 1907 and 1915?
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gravity
A galactic cluster, about five billion light-years away, produces a tremendous gravitational field that “bends” light around it. This lens produces multiple copies of a blue galaxy about twice as distant. Four images are visible in a circle surrounding the lens; a fifth is visible near the center of the picture, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
After publishing his special theory of relativity in 1905, Albert Einstein recognized that it could not account for gravity or acceleration. His development of general relativity between 1907 and 1915 was driven by two core principles:12
- The Equivalence Principle: In 1907, Einstein realized that an observer in a closed room could not distinguish between the effects of a gravitational field and uniform acceleration. He reasoned that if gravity and acceleration are equivalent, light must bend in a gravitational field just as it would in an accelerating frame.12
- General Covariance: Einstein sought to ensure that the laws of physics maintained the same mathematical form across all reference frames, not just those moving uniformly.3
The mathematical formulation of these ideas proved difficult. In 1912, mathematician Marcel Grossman introduced Einstein to tensor analysis, which provided the necessary tools to describe physics in curved space-time. After several years of intensive work, Einstein completed the theory in November 1915, successfully using it to explain the anomalous precession of Mercury’s perihelion.12