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Published May 2014 | public
Journal Article

Why Einstein did not believe that general relativity geometrizes gravity

Abstract

I argue that, contrary to folklore, Einstein never really cared for geometrizing the gravitational or (subsequently) the electromagnetic field; indeed, he thought that the very statement that General Relativity geometrizes gravity "is not saying anything at all". Instead, I shall show that Einstein saw the "unification" of inertia and gravity as one of the major achievements of General Relativity. Interestingly, Einstein did not locate this unification in the field equations but in his interpretation of the geodesic equation, the law of motion of test particles.

Additional Information

© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. Received 27 May 2013; Accepted 13 August 2013; Available online 5 March 2014. I would like to thank the Einstein Papers Project, in particular Diana Kormos-Buchwald and Tilman Sauer, for training and hospitality without which this work would not have been possible, and the Center for Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh for hospitality while I worked on the last three iterations of this article. I would like to thank John Norton in particular, for patiently reading these last versions, and for giving enormously fruitful feedback and comments on all of them. I would also like to thank Harvey Brown, Marco Giovanelli, Carsten Held, Michel Janssen, Eleanor Knox, Maria Kronfeldner, Oliver Pooley, Alexander Reutlinger, Collin Rice, Jack Ritchie, Tilman Sauer, Erhard Scholz, John Stachel, Kyle Stanford and Serife Tekin for comments on earlier versions of the paper; and audiences at Pittsburgh, San Diego, Jena, Notre Dame and the University of Maryland for inspring discussion and feedback.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 26, 2023