Einstein and the history of general relativity. Based on the proceedings of the 1986 Osgood Hill Conference held in North Andover, MA, USA, May 8-11, 1986 (Q1900767)

The opening of the Einstein archive to the public in 1980 and the establishment of the Center for Einstein Studies in 1984 have been followed by a remarkable rise in scholarly activity concerned with the history of general relativity and in particular Einstein's own contributions to this subject. The Einstein Studies of which this is the first volume are devoted to publish scientific papers on all aspects of Einstein's life and work, including historical and philosophical issues, but also questions of current research in physics as mathematics as far as developments and extensions of Einstein's work are concerned. This volume, based on the 1986 conference on The History of General Relativity at Boston University's Osgood Hill Conference Center, focuses mainly on two subjects: Einstein's discovery of the general theory, and the reception and development of general relativity from 1912 to 1959. With regard to the first question, two papers by \textit{John Stachel}, Einstein's search for general covariance, and \textit{John Norton}, How Einstein found his field equations, are concerned with the period between 1912 when Einstein recognized the non-Euclidean nature of the spacetime metric and its physical determination by gravitation, and 1915 when he found his gravitational field equations and could explain with them the perihelion motion of Mercury. In \textit{John Norton}, What was Einstein's principle of equivalence?, the controversial question is addressed of what exactly Einstein meant to be the principle of equivalence, and the role it played in his search for the general theory between 1907 and 1915. \textit{John Stachel}, The rigidly rotating disk as the ``missing link'' in the history of general relativity, argues that Einstein's treatment of the relativistic rigidly rotating disk provides a missing link in his chain of reasoning that led to the idea that a nonflat metric was necessary for describing the gravitational field. Seven papers in this volume appear in the section on the reception and development of general relativity, starting with two papers by \textit{Carlo Cattani} and \textit{Michelangelo De Maria}: Max Abraham and the reception of relativity in Italy: his 1912 and 1914 controversies with Einstein; and The 1915 epistolary controversy between Einstein and Tullio Levi-Civita. \textit{A. J. Knox}, Hendrik Antoon Lorenz, the ether, and the general theory of relativity, tries to clear up the seeming paradox that Lorentz kept insisting upon the ether concept until his death in 1928, and at the same time become one of the first ardent propagandists in the Netherlands of Einstein's general theory. The early development of the theory following 1916 is the subject of two papers: \textit{Jean Eisenstaedt}, The early interpretation of the Schwarzschild solution, and \textit{Peter Havas}, The early history of the ``problem of motion'' in general relativity. \textit{J. Eisenstaedt}, The low water mark of general relativity, 1925-1955, presents an abridged English version of an originally French paper which appeared in [Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 35, 115-185 (1986; Zbl 0588.01008)]. Three rather short papers deal with questions of quantization and unified field theories: \textit{Peter G. Bergmann}, The canonical formulation of general-relativistic theories: the early years, 1930-1959; \textit{Vladimir P. Vizgin}, Einstein, Hilbert, and Weyl: The genesis of the geometrical unified field theory program; \textit{Michel Biezunski}, Inside the coconut: the Einstein-Cartan discussion on distant parallelism. The historical development of relativistic cosmology is the subject of the two papers concluding this volume: \textit{Pierre Kerzberg}, The Einstein-de Sitter controversy of 1916-1917 and the rise of relativistic cosmology; and \textit{George F. R. Ellis}, The expanding universe: a history of cosmology from 1917 to 1960. The broad range and wide prospective of the articles collected here makes this volume, as well as the other volumes in the series, invaluable not only to specialists but to anybody interested in the development of general relativity.