Zurich. From him I learned for the first time about Ricci and later about Riemann.”
12
. Sartori, 275.
13
. Amir Aczel, “Riemann’s Metric,” in Aczel 1999, 91–101; Hoffmann 1983, 144–151.
14
. I am grateful to Tilman Sauer and Craig Copi for help with this section.
15
. Janssen 2002; Greene 2004, 72.
16
. Calaprice, 9; Fluckiger, 121.
17
. The Zurich Notebook is in CPAE 4: 10. An online facsimile is available at echo.mpiwg- berlin.mpg.de/content/relativityrevolution/jnul. See also Janssen and Renn.
18
. Norton 2000, 147. See also Renn and Sauer 2006, 151. I am grateful to Tilman Sauer for his editing of this section.
19
. Einstein, Zurich Notebook, CPAE 4: 10 (German edition), p. 39 has the first notations of what became known as the Einstein tensor.
20
. An explanation of this dilemma is in Renn and Sauer 1997, 42–43. The
mystery of why Einstein in early 1913 could not find the correct gravitational tensor—and the issue of his understanding of coordinate condition options—is addressed nicely in Renn 2005b, 11–14. He builds on, and suggests some revisions to, the conclusions of Norton 1984.
21
. Norton, Janssen, and Sauer have all suggested that Einstein’s bad experience in 1913 of abandoning a mathematical strategy for a physical one, and his subsequent belated success with a mathematical strategy, is reflected in the views he expressed in his 1933 Spencer lecture at Oxford and also his approach in the later decades of his life to finding a unified field theory.
22
. Einstein, “Outline [
] of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and of a Theory of Gravitation” (with Marcel Grossmann), before May 28, 1913, CPAE 4: 13; Janssen 2004; Janssen and Renn.
23
. Einstein to Elsa Einstein, Mar. 23, 1913.
24
. Einstein-Besso manuscript, CPAE 4: 14; Janssen, 2002.
25
. Einstein, “On the Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity,”
(Mar. 6, 1918), CPAE 7: 4. A vivid explanation of Newton’s bucket and how it connects to relativity is in Greene 2004, 23–74. Einstein is largely responsible for inferring how Mach would regard an empty universe. See Norton 1995c; Julian Barbour,“General Relativity as a Perfectly Machian Theory,” Carl Hoefer, “Einstein’s Formulation of Mach’s Principle,” and Hubert Goenner, “Mach’s Principle and Theories of Gravity,” all in Barbour and Pfister.
26
. Janssen 2002, 14; Janssen 2004, 17; Janssen 2006. Janssen has done important work analyzing the Einstein-Besso collaborations of 1913. Reproductions of the Einstein-Besso manuscript and other related documents, along with an essay by Janssen on their significance, is in a 288-page catalogue from Christie’s, which auctioned the originals on Oct. 4, 2002. (The 50-page Einstein-Besso manuscript sold for $595, 000.) For an example of how Einstein dismissed Besso’s suggestion that the Minkowski metric in rotating coordinates wasn’t a valid solution to the
field equations—and how Einstein kept feeling that the
did indeed comply with Mach’s principle—see Einstein to Michele Besso, ca. Mar. 10, 1914.
27
