Einstein’s Path to Relativity

This presentation by Jurgen Renn charts Einstein’s journey from his 1905 ‘annus mirabilis’ (‘miracle year’) when he was still a lowly unknown patent clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. Just ten years later in 1915, with the publication of General Relativity, he emerged as the undisputed giant of 20th-century physics. The presentation focuses on the insights Einstein gained from his thought experiments and his interactions with fellow physicists and mathematicians at the time. Einsten was hugely influenced by people like James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physcist who unified light and electromagnetism, and Ernst Mach, the German philosopher and mathematician, who famously questioned Newton’s ideas of absolute time, amongst others. Marcel Grossman, who mentored Einstein’s early mathematical efforts in General Relativity in the ‘Zurich notebook’, exposed Einstein to some of the mathematical tools that would be needed to formulate General Relativity. Foremost amongst these was the Ricci tensor developed by Italian mathemeticians  Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro in 1887–1896, and subsequently popularized in a paper written with his pupil Tullio Levi-Civita in 1900. This work was in turn based on earlier work by German mathematics giant, Bernhardt Reimann.