SMuK 2023 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 2: Space and Time

AGPhil 2.1: Talk

Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 11:00–11:30, JAN/0027

Einstein's forgotten interpretation of GR: against geometrization and for the unification of gravity and inertia — •Dennis Lehmkuhl — Lichtenberg Group for History and Philosophy of Physics, University of Bonn

Almost every textbook on general relativity tells us that the main lesson of the theory is that gravity is not a force but that it can be reduced to space-time geometry, that gravity is the curvature of spacetime. Unbeknownst to most, Einstein himself actively opposed this interpretation of his theory. He thought that instead general relativity should be seen as a unification of gravity and inertia, analogous to the unification of electricity and magnetism in special relativistic electrodynamics. In this talk I am going to outline how this interpretation of general relativity originated in Einstein's work on a relativistic theory of gravity before he first embarked on a metric theory in 1913, and how his interpretation of the equivalence principle made him hold on to this interpretation even after more and more physicists and philosophers opted for a geometric interpretation of the theory. Finally, I will compare the geometric and the unificationist interpretation and discuss whether either or both of them can be upheld in the modern context.