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Participant	Janssen, Michel
Institution	Program in History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota, Tate Laboratory of Physics - 116 Church Street S.E. - Minneapolis, - Minnesota - USA
Session	Talk	Abstract

H1	How Einstein really found his field equations	I report on the work of a research group led by Jürgen Renn of the Max Planck Institute for History of Science (Berlin) analyzing Einstein’s route to general relativity. Our main focus has been the so-called Zurich Notebook, which preserves Einstein’s research notes on gravity of the winter of 1912-1913. Our analysis has, among other things, resulted in a new account of how Einstein originally arrived at the field equations of general relativity in the fall of 1915. The received view is that Einstein got out of a tangle of incompatible physical requirements by cutting the Gordian knot and switching to mathematical considerations that put him on a royal road to the Einstein field equations. We argue that Einstein untied rather than cut the knot. In this he was guided by physical considerations, in particular by concerns about energy-momentum conservation. Considerations of mathematical elegance played only a subsidiary role, despite Einstein‚s emphatic later claims to the contrary. These later pronouncements have left us with a distorted picture of the methodology that brought Einstein his greatest successes.