The rejection of the Ricci tensor in Einstein's first tensorial theory of gravitation (Q1205955)

As far as the development of general relativity is concerned, the period between the second half of 1912 to the second half of 1915 was one of the most exciting, several historians tried to understand the difficulties Einstein had in finding his gravitational field equations. It is a matter of fact that Einstein and Grossmann initially made the right choice in taking the Ricci tensor as the gravitational field tensor, but very soon they rejected this idea. The author agrees with John Norton that the reason for this rejection was a mistaken generalization of the idea of static gravitational fields. In the following the author tries to give a complete answer in viewing the ``Entwurf paper not or, better, not only as a starting point on the way to the final form of general relativity, but also as a consequence of the theory of 1907-12'' (p. 365). While the general relativity demanded a break with special relativity, Einstein insisted on a generalization in such a way that it contained the particular case. Already in 1907 Einstein was ready to give up the idea \(c\)=const. in order to put his trust in the principle of equivalence. In the beginning of the year 1912 he published two papers on the scalar theory of the gravitational field. The metric tensor \[ \begin{pmatrix} -1 &0 &0 &0\\ 0 &-1 &0 &0\\ 0 &0 &-1 &0\\ 0 &0 &0 &c^ 2\end{pmatrix} \] was only generalized by \(c=g_{44}=g_{44}(x_ 1,x_ 2,x_ 3)\). Thus, the Ricci tensor and the metric for a static field turned out to be incompatible: Einstein thought of arguments against general covariance. Einstein did not abandon this special form of metric until he realized that this assumption was groundless. There are mentioned several reasons to make Einstein's insistence understandable. The author based his paper not only on published material, but also on the Zürich notebook and letters from the Einstein-Archive.