Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

( Completed: 2010)

The Reorganization of Classical Knowledge on Gravitation

Jürgen Renn, Matthias Schemmel

The emergence of general relativity is studied focusing, first, on the work of Albert Einstein and, second, on the largely unexplored history of alternative approaches to the problem of gravitation in late classical physics. Further work is devoted to the reaction to the new theory by a broader public in the 1920s.