HR1 - History of Relativity and Cosmology ( |
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Speaker |
Sauer, Tilman |
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| Talk Title |
The History of Distant Parallelism Revisited |
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Abstract |
In the years from 1928 to 1931, Einstein tried to base a unified field theory on the geometry of teleparallism, i.e. on a space-time geometry determined by a tetrad field that defines both a spatially-flat connection of distant parallelism as well as a metric field with an associated Levi-Civita connection. Unaware of prior mathematical work on this topic by E.Bortolotti, E.Cartan, L.P.Eisenhart, G.Vitali, R.Weitzenboeck, and others, Einstein looked for field equations for the tetrad field that would comprise both the gravitational field and the Maxwell field. In the talk I will reconsider this episode in the light of contemporary correspondence with mathematicians and physicists as well as unpublished manuscripts. |
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