The culmination of any scientific work is a publication in a renowned specialist journal. When Albert Einstein’s article “The Basis of the General Theory of Relativity” was published in the journal “Annalen der Physik” on March 20, 1916, the physicist, who had just turned 37 a few days earlier, was already recognized as one of the greats of his profession.
Einstein had moved from the specific to the general. While still working as a technical pre-examiner at the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, in 1905 he published articles on quantum theory and the theory of relativity in the “Annalen der Physik” and expanded Max Planck’s quantum theory to include the hypothesis of light quanta: light particles without mass, which can therefore also move at the speed of light.
His “special theory of relativity” quickly caught on in science, Einstein habilitated at the University of Bern and in 1909 received an extraordinary professorship for theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. In 1914 he received a call to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and was freed from teaching duties and was able to devote himself entirely to his research.
Ambitious goals
He uses the lecture-free time to formulate his life’s work, which is well known and understood in much smaller circles. On November 25, 1915, he presented “The field equations of gravitation” to the expert audience, thereby completing his general theory of relativity.
Einstein thus redefines gravity. According to the universal genius Isaac Newton, it was considered the attractive force between two bodies, determined by their mass and distance from one another. Einstein opens up a new perspective on the “an apple falls from the tree” phenomenon and revolutionizes the world view of physics.
Gravity is therefore a geometric property of the structure of space and time. Two bodies in motion need not collide because they attract each other or because they are both attracted by a third body. They can even move on parallel orbits, which then merge because space-time distortions do just that.
However, this cannot be observed with the path of the apple to the ground. The Newtonian view of gravity is perfectly adequate for the vast majority of everyday situations in which one is not moving at the speed of light or the mass of a black hole.
Einstein himself identified a problem in theoretical physics: “The initial hypotheses are becoming more and more abstract and remote from experience” – especially when the scientific goals are as ambitious as Einstein’s theories. Since its publication, his perspective has enabled researchers to describe gravitational phenomena better, to predict new ones and to confirm them in experiments.
To home page
