Re: Einstein, Hawking, and a myth about relativity

[Roger Haar <haar@PHYSICS.ARIZONA.EDU>]

Hi,
        At the time Einstein wrote his GR paper, the use
of tensors was fairly limited and in competition
with things like quarter ions.  I think that even
our common vector analysis with grad, curl, div
was still evolving.  Consider that the summation
convention was created by Einstein.  It was not
that a fair number of scientist could not learn
the math needed for GR, it was only that at the
time GR was introduced, not many had enough
familiarity with tensor to be able to grasp the
meaning of the theory.  My guess is that changed
fairly quickly.  I suspect that GR is one of the
reasons that tensor were chosen by the physics
community for use over other things like quarter
ions.

Thanks
Roger Haar
U of AZ

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Stephen Speicher wrote:

> SNIP
>      The theory, however, was thought to be
>      almost impossibibly complicated mathematically; in the
>      1920s there were said to be only a dozen people in the
>      world who understood it.
> Snip