[PmbPhy (OP)]

For close to two decades now I've been working to educate physicists who work in relativity and relativity enthusiasts about how Einstein really interpreted the presence of a gravitational field. Almost everyone who understands General Relativity (GR) believes that gravity is a curvature in spacetime. Whether this is right or wrong depends on how to interpret the existence of a gravitational field. There are two ways which are commonly discussed in GR;

1) There is a gravitational field present if the

Tonight I was sorting out my filing cabinet and came across this article which I stumbled across while surfing the internet a very long time ago, printed it out and put it away, forgetting to read it. The name of the article is A Negation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Return to Newtonian Gravitation.  The paper is online at:

http://physicsessays.org/browse-journal-2/product/1082-8-stephan-j-g-gift-a-negation-of-einstein-s-general-theory-of-relativity-and-a-return-to-newtonian-gravitation.html [Links inactive - To make links active and clickable, login or click here to register]

All the GRists who think that GR is wrong base their argument on the equivalence principle being wrong. All these people think that Einstein said the following:

In an arbitrary gravitational field no local experiment can distinguish a freely falling non-rotating system (local inertial system) from a uniformly moving system in the absence of a gravitational field.

The problem here is that Einstein never said that! What Einstein did say is the following.

A uniform gravitational field is equivalent to a uniform gravitational field.

As most of you already know I've carefully documented all of this in a paper I wrote which is online. The article is entitled Einstein's gravitational field. You can find it at:http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0204044

The reason I held on to it is because the premise of the article, i.e. the theory is wrong, is wrong itself.

What I'd like to know is how many of you actually believe that Einstein said that gravity is a curvature in spacetime? I've brought this subject up and the article many many times in this forum. However there are a lot of newcomers here who might find this interesting. Thank you all for your participation.

[Colin2B]

I agree with you on the uniform field.

The other question is one I've been considering posting a question on (elsewhere, away from Box Noise).
I don't believe he did say gravity is a curvature of spacetime. I think he was basically saying that both gravitational field and motion distort our measurement of space and time in a similar way. He didn't attribute gravity to being caused by a bending of spacetime, but that the 'bending' describes how objects move in a gravitational field.

[PmbPhy (OP)]

I agree with you on the uniform field.

The other question is one I've been considering posting a question on (elsewhere, away from Box Noise).
I don't believe he did say gravity is a curvature of spacetime. I think he was basically saying that both gravitational field and motion distort our measurement of space and time in a similar way. He didn't attribute gravity to being caused by a bending of spacetime, but that the 'bending' describes how objects move in a gravitational field.

Thanks. Very good!

[PmbPhy (OP)]

I should mention that some older texts by famous physicists such as Theory of Relativity by Wolfgang Relativity, Introduction to the Theory of Relativity by Peter Gabriel Bergmann and The Theory of Relativity by C. Moller. All are available online at http://book4you.org/ [Links inactive - To make links active and clickable, login or click here to register] . There's a huge number of textbooks available online there for free. All that is required is to join. Membership is free and they don't require a credit card either.

[JoeBrown]

When you boil GR down to the bare essentials, it shows vector path of a point through the fields know as gravity.  Speed/time are distorted.  Einstein quoted speed as a constant and then found you had to fluctuate time depending on the strength of gravity.

Curiously enough, if you change C to a variable, time could be the constant.  However, that makes does make what he said confusing, because that's not what he said.

But we know C varies, depending on the density of mass through which particles of light traverse...  Einstein was working to resolve these issues, but never resolved the Theory to a Grand Unified theory of everything.  I *guess* its because he wanted C to remain constant.

GR doesn't account for point volume (size) only it's weight in fields of gravity.  GR also doesn't refer to heat as part of the equation.  However, if one looks at the curves of GR, heat transfer and speed differentials would be most pronounced in the curves which would also account for a lot of missing data w/respect to GR and the big/small. 

GR is beautiful because it's simple.  Its simple because it ignores electromagnetism, heat and volume/area of a mass's size.  But shows quite well the vector path of points through the field of space & gravity - time & speed.

Everything GR ignores QM works to resolve...  Grand unified theory would be nice, but we've got to overcome large scale ignorance first.