What is General Relativity?
General relativity (GR) [also called the general theory of relativity (GTR) and general relativity theory (GRT)] is the geometrical theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915/16.[1][2] It unifies special relativity and Sir Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation with the insight that gravitational force can be regarded as the manifestation of the curvature of space and time, with this curvature being produced by the mass-energy and momentum content of the matter in space-time. General relativity is distinguished from other metric theories of gravitation by its use of the Einstein field equations to relate space-time content and space-time curvature. General relativity is currently the most successful gravitational theory, being almost universally accepted and well supported by observations. The first success of general relativity was in explaining the anomalous perihelion precession of Mercury. Then in 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington announced that observations of stars
General Relativity is basicaly your relation to your surrounds…..its like a frame of refence….to detemine if things are moveing we relate them to their surroundings….like if we see a car on the highway we say “ok, relative to the road that car is moveing.” however if you are going the same speed as that car, the car is not moveing at all…..
General relativity is also referred to as “The General Theory of Relativity.” It was initially presented in a paper by Albert Einstein in 1915. Its primary thrust was to add the effects of gravity to “The Special Theory of Relativity,” making special relativity a special case of general relativity. In the same way, ten years earlier, Einstein proposed The Theory of Special Relativity with the primary thrust of eliminating the concept of a fixed reference frame in favor of relative inertial frames in conjunction with the newly learned fact that the speed of light was a constant when measured in any inertial reference frame. This theory, in a similar way, makes the Newtonian Euclidian geometry of space a special case of special relativity. So rather than these new theories refuting the old theories, they actually verified that the previous theories were special cases of a more complicated theory that explains more of reality. Many of us who have studied physics remember an equation that
General relativity is a scientific theory describing how matter, energy, time, and space interact. It was first published by Albert Einstein in 1917 as an extension to his theory of special relativity. General relativity treats space and time as a single unified four-dimensional “spacetime”; under general relativity, matter deforms the geometry of spacetime, and spacetime deformations cause matter to move, which we see as gravity. The basic assumption of general relativity is that forces caused by gravity and forces caused by acceleration are equivalent. If a closed box is undergoing acceleration, no experiment done within the box can tell if the box is at rest within a gravitational field, or is being accelerated through space. This principle, that all physical laws are the same for accelerated observers and observers in a gravitational field, is known as the equivalence principle; it has been experimentally tested to more than twelve decimal places of accuracy. The most important con
Einstein worked on incorporating gravitation into relativity theory from 1907 to 1915; by 1915, General Relativity had assumed pretty much its modern form. (Oh, the mathematicians found some spots to apply polish and gold-plating, but the conceptual foundations remain the same.) If you asked him to list the crucial features of General Relativity in 1907, and again in 1915, you’d probably get very different lists. Certainly modern physicists have a different list from Einstein’s 1907 list.
