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He tried to gain an insight:. In this he is following the heroic method that proved so successful […] in the theory of relativity. Unfortunately there are many possible approaches, and since each requires a year or more of intensive computation, progress has been heartbreakingly slow.
Only E. The others, big names and lesser known contributors except for the mathematician J.
Schouten, shunned this topic. He described his intentions in going beyond general relativity and essentially presented the content of his paper with E. His impression was:. The proof of their physical usefulness is a tremendously difficult task, inasmuch as mere approximations will not suffice. His first paper of opened with a discussion, mostly from the point of view of mathematics, concerning the possibilities for the construction of UFT with a non-symmetric fundamental tensor.
As the fundamental tensor is no longer considered symmetrical, the symmetry of the connection as in Riemannian geometry must also be weakened. In fact, for the conjugate: In Eq. Neither nor are Hermitian: We have The anti-Hermitian part of is given by. Solovine, on 25 January , was:. A few weeks ago, it has caused a loud rustling noise in the newspaper sheets although nobody except the translator had really seen the thing. In the book, the translator is identified to have been Sonja Bargmann , the wife of Valentine, who also had translated other essays by Einstein.
He then set up such a variational principle The only remarks concerning a relationship between mathematical objects and physical observables made by Einstein at the very end of Appendix II are:. There are at present few physicists who share this view.
McCrea reflected his own modesty. Although more cautious, he was very clear: After all, a human being is only a poor wretch! Also, W. Pauli commented on this 3rd edition. Starting from the Cauchy problem, i. This discussion calls back into memory the intensive correspondence Einstein had carried on between and with the French mathematician E. Cartan on an equivalent problem within the theory of teleparallelism, cf.
At the time, he had asked whether his partial differential equations PDEs had a large enough set of solutions. It had taken Cartan a considerable effort of convincing Einstein of the meaningfulness of his calculations also for physics [ ] , pp. As mentioned above, W. Pauli had noticed this and combined it with another statement of his rejection of the theory. Compatibility was shown later by A. In the meantime, Mme. Choquet-Bruhat, during her stay at Princeton in and , had discussed the Cauch-problem with Einstein such that he might have received a new impulse from her.
Let us postpone the details and just list his results. Similarly, he found for the Maxwell vacuum equations,.
Einstein noted that by introducing the vector potential , and taking into account the Lorentz gauge, i. Then, writing in place of the previous , his formulas could be condensed into:.
Following an invitation by the editors of Scientific American to report on his recent research, Einstein made it clear that he would not give. That should be done only with theories which have been adequately confirmed by experiment. He then sketched the three systems of field equations obtained, here denoted System I , and Systems Ia, Ib. However, it was not a compatible system as were the other two. But this does not prove that it corresponds to nature. Experience alone can decide the truth. Yet we have achieved something if we have succeeded in formulating a meaningful and precise question.
Painstaking efforts and probably new mathematics would be required before the theory could be confronted with experiment.
There were not only skeptics but people like Dr. He pointed out that the theory permits a class of similarity solutions, i. Nevertheless, Einstein remained optimistic; in the same letter to Max Born, in which he had admitted his shortcoming vis-a-vis the complexity of his theory, he wrote:. His Italian colleague Bruno Finzi was convinced that the final aim had been reached:.
Therefore, the game is over, and the geometric model of the macrocosm has been constructed. However, at the end of his article, Finzi pointed out that it might be difficult to experimentally verify the theory, and thought it necessary to warn that even if such an empirical base had been established, this theory would have to be abandoned after new effects not covered by it were observed.
Einstein still grappled with the problem of how to set up a convincing system of field equations.