418 DOC.
42
SPECIAL AND GENERAL RELATIVITY
Translations
of
editorial
notes
[4]...
and later additions:
"Appendix
to
the third edition.
This
year
(1918)
Springer-Verlag published
an
elaborate excellent textbook
on
the
general theory
of
relativity,
written
by
H.
Weyl
with
the title
Space.
Time.
Matter. It is
to
be
warmly
recommended
to
mathematicians and
physicists."
...
signed
on
November
9,
1920:
"More than
ever
it is
necessary
in
our
hectic
times
to nurture
those
things
which
can bring people
of
a
different
language
and
nation closer
to
each other
again.
From this
point
of view it
is
of
particular
importance
to
facilitate the
exchange
of scientific endeavors
even
under these
currently
difficult conditions.
I
am
glad
that
my
booklet will
now appear
in the
Russian
language,
the
more so as
Herr
Itelson,
whom
I
highly esteem,
is
guaranteed
to
provide
an
excellent translation. The author has often been scolded for
saying
his
booklet is
'intelligible
to
all';
and therefore the Russian reader who encounters
difficulties
in
comprehension
should
not
get angry
at
himself
or
Herr Itelson. The
really
guilty one
is
no one
other than the
author
himself."
...
Czech
translation
(Einstein
1923):
"I
am glad
that this little
booklet,
in which
the basic ideas of the
theory
of
relativity
are presented
without mathematical
formalism,
appears
now
in the national
language
of the
country
where I found the
necessary contemplation
to
gradually give
the
general theory
of
relativity
a more
precise
form,
an
endeavor whose basic idea
I
adopted already
in
1908.
In the
quiet
rooms
of the Institute of Theoretical
Physics
at the German
University
of
Prague,
in
Vinicna
ulice,
I discovered
in
1911 that the
principle
of
equivalence
demands
a
deflection of the
light
rays
passing by
the
sun
with observable
magnitude-this
without
knowing
that
more
than
one
hundred
years ago
a
similar
consequence
had
been
anticipated
from Newton's
mechanics
in combination with
Newton's emission
theory
of
light.
I
also discovered
at
Prague
the still not
completely
confirmed
consequence
of the redshift
of
spectral
lines.
However, only
after
my
return
in
1912
to
Zurich did
I
hit
upon
the decisive idea about the
analogy
between the mathematical
problem
connected with
my theory
and the
theory
of surfaces
by
Gauss-originally
without
knowledge
of the research
by Riemann, Ricci,
and Levi-Civita. The latter
research
came
to
my
attention
only
through my
friend Grossmann in Zurich when
I
posed
the
problem
to
him
only
to
find
generally
covariant
tensors
whose
components
depend only upon
the derivatives
of
the coefficients of the
quadratic
fundamental
invariant.
Today
it
appears
that
we
can
clearly recognize
the achievements and
limitations
of
the
theory.
The
theory provides deep insights
into the
physical
nature
of
space, time, matter,
and
gravitation,
but
no
adequate means
to solve the
problems
of
quanta
and the atomic constitution of
elementary
electric structures that constitute
matter."
...
...
The text
is:
"I added in
a
4th
appendix
an
exposition
of
my
views
on
the