🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Nov6.232435.15628@galois.mit.edu> jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez) writes:

>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.

In fact, isn't there some old chestnut about Hilbert presenting
Einstein's field equation some time before Einstein published it?
I suppose Hilbert had probably been influenced by what Einstein had
been saying for the previous ten years, though.

(Also, I seem to remember that Einstein ``had'' his equation some
time before he finally published it, but he originally thought it
had some physical pathology, and abandoned it for a while).

Bryan