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GP: Geschichte der Physik

GP 6: Geschichte der Physik III

GP 6.4: Talk

Tuesday, March 8, 2005, 12:15–12:40, TU H3024

Translation of Einstein’s Teleparallel Attempt with Comments — •Alexander Unzicker and Timothy Case — Pestalozzi-Gymnasium München

We present the first English translation of Einstein’s original papers related to the teleparallel attempt of a unified field theory. Our collection contains the review paper in Math. Annal. 102 (1930) pp.685-697 and 2 reports published in ’Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften’ on June 7th, 1928 (pp. 217-221), June 14th, 1928 (pp. 224-227) and a precursor report (July 9th, 1925 pp. 414-419). To ease understanding, modern literature on tensor analysis is quoted in the footnotes.

Further relations to modern differential geometry are discussed. A description by means of differential forms thus will show one of the proposed field equations to be unnatural.

Unknown to Einstein, the geometric concept of torsion can be visualized by a dislocation density in crystalline bodies. This helps distinguishing the physically different components of torsion in Einstein’s equations.