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Article #4182GR with no Einstein? (Was: Re: No big crunch?)
From: John C. Baez
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1992 23:24
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1992 23:24
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In article <1992Nov6.042306.899@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes: > Suppose, as I have been, that you *don't even have* GR. > In 1906, there was no certainty that GR would be developed. > In fact, if Einstein had died in 1906, I'm quite sure it > wouldn't have been. Oh good, let's argue about this, since it is utterly contrafactual. I'm sure GR would have been developed (though not in 1906!). Einstein was not the only person working on trying to come up with relavistic theories of gravity. Other people came up with some that were getting sort of close (sorry, I don't have references on this - it would be fun to know just *how* close). And more importantly, the mathematical infrastructure had already been laid by Riemann and was being studied by Cartan and Hilbert, who were sort of into physics. So I am quite sure someone would have come up with GR after a while.
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Newsgroups: sci.physics Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!galois!riesz!jbaez From: jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez) Subject: GR with no Einstein? (Was: Re: No big crunch?) Message-ID: <1992Nov6.232435.15628@galois.mit.edu> Sender: news@galois.mit.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: riesz Organization: MIT Department of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA References: <1992Nov6.020022.29066@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1dco23INNh7j@agate.berkeley.edu> <1992Nov6.042306.899@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 23:24:35 GMT Lines: 16