Chapter 29 Chapter 27 Relativity and Quantum Theory (1)

For non-scientists and scientists alike, relativity is synonymous with the scientific revolution of this century, and for those in the know, quantum theory (and especially its development, quantum mechanics) is an even greater revolution .We will see the greatness of Einstein as a scientist who made fundamental contributions to both revolutions. Talking about the theory of relativity, we must remember that there are two different theories of relativity: one is the special theory of relativity (1905), which studies the problems of time, space and simultaneity, from which the famous mass-energy relationship E=mc2 is derived.The second was general relativity (1915), which dealt with the problem of gravity.Although both theories of relativity were revolutionary, discussions of the relativity revolution have focused primarily on the consequences of special relativity.However, the event that really brought the world's attention to special relativity was the confirmation of a prediction of general relativity in 1919 that starlight would be deflected by the sun's gravitational field as it passed near the sun.This verification was accomplished by astronomical observations made during a solar eclipse, an event that instantly popularized the theory of relativity and made Einstein an overnight household name.

special relativity Einstein first proposed the principle of special relativity in 1905, and the paper was published in the "Physical Yearbook". In the same year, he made an important supplement to the special theory of relativity, and established the original form of mass-energy relationship for radiation problems. In 1907, Einstein completed a review article on the theory of relativity, which included the general form of the mass-energy relationship E=m2.His remarkable thesis established entirely new concepts of mass, time, and space, and challenged the apparently simple notion of simultaneity.Initially, Einstein proposed the "principle of relativity" and introduced "another hypothesis": "In any given inertial system, no matter whether the luminous object is at rest or moving at a uniform speed, the The speed of propagation is a definite value C".The great significance of the theory of relativity lies in that it abandons the "absolute" space-time concept and the idea that space is filled with ether; at that time, ether was regarded as the propagation medium of light and other forms of electromagnetic waves.

It now appears that the June 1905 publication of Einstein's seminal paper on relativity in the Annals of Physics was a classic example of a theoretical revolution phase.As we have seen in Chapter 2, M.When Both studied "Electrodynamics and Optics of Moving Objects" in Göttingen in 1905-1906, he had never heard of Einstein and his work. The same was true of the University of Cambridge in 1906-1907.According to the recollection of Einstein's sister (Pace 1982, 150-151), Einstein "imagined publishing a paper in a prestigious journal with a large readership, and it would immediately attract attention".Of course, he expected "the strongest opposition and the harshest criticism", but he was "very disappointed" by the lack of response and "cold treatment".Soon, he received M.A letter from Planck raising questions about several doubtful points in the paper, which made Einstein "extraordinarily gratified" because Planck was "one of the greatest physicists of his time".The theory of relativity quickly became an interesting discussion and research topic for physicists.This dramatic change is mainly due to Planck's earlier and deeper involvement in the study of relativity.In the second year after Einstein's paper was published, Planck began to lecture on the theory of relativity in Berlin, but the basis of his lectures was not Einstein's work but Lorentz's electron theory. In 1907, Planck's assistant von Laue (later Nobel laureate) published a monograph on relativity.

In September 1906, Planck delivered a lecture on relativity at the German Physical Society (published in a magazine in the same year); in 1907, under the guidance of Planck, K. V．Mosengel completed the first doctoral thesis devoted to relativity (Pace 1982, 150-151).Pace points out that there are too few people involved in the field early on.Y. Ulzburg.L. of Raub and Breslau (Uroslau).Ladenberg is one of the few exceptions.Laue once visited Einstein in Bern and found it incredible that this young man "turned out to be the "father of the theory of relativity". A few years later von Laue wrote an excellent academic paper introducing relativity In a letter to Einstein dated March 24, 1917, von Laue expressed his excitement over his revolutionary work in physics: "At last it has come true!My revolutionary views on wave optics have been published". He goes on to write that at "this critical juncture" they "doubtless excite the strongest hatred of every conservative physicist"; These condemned views".

In addition to Born himself introducing how he heard about the theory of relativity every time, we also learned from L.Infield learned some of the situation at that time.Infield (1950, 44) talked about his friend S.One of the things Professor Loria told him was that after reading Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity, Loria's teacher "Professor Witkowski of Clark University (who was a very great teacher)" Excitedly shouting at Loria: "Read Einstein's papers, another Copernicus is born!" After some time (Born said it was 1907) Loria spoke at a physics conference I met Born on the Internet, and he told Born about Einstein and asked him if he had read the relativity paper.As a result, "not only Born, but everyone present had never heard of Einstein".Immediately, Infield's story says, they "ran to the library, pulled Volume 17 of the Annals of Physics from the shelf, and began reading Einstein's papers."Infield said, M.Born immediately recognized the greatness of the theory of relativity and at the same time felt the need to formalize it mathematically.Infeld believes that Both's later work on the theory of relativity "is an important early contribution to this field of science".

Initially, few physicists expressed their willingness to accept Einstein's special theory of relativity, so it was not enough to trigger a scientific revolution worldwide.But there are some supporters among German theoretical physicists. In July 1907, Planck said in a letter to Einstein: "The advocates of the principle of relativity have only formed a small circle", so he firmly believed that "it is especially important to achieve a consensus" among them (Pace 1982, 151). The "Principle of Relativity" embodies both Planck's personal preferred Lorentz theory and Einstein's theory of relativity, however, Einstein's popularity continued to grow, though still slowly, and in the autumn of 1907, J.Stark (editor of the Annals of Radiation and Electricity) wrote to Einstein asking him to write a review of the theory of relativity. In 1906 Planck had used the term Theory of Relativity (Miller 1981, 88), but in 1907 Einstein adopted the more familiar name today – relativity.The first paper to cite Einstein's paper on relativity was W.Kaufman wrote in 1905.He believes that Einstein's "research ... is the same in form as Lorenz's research", but the latter is beneficial to generalization.Kaufmann concluded by saying that his own experimental data refuted Einstein's and Lorentz's electron theories, and we'll come back to that later.

lop year, B．Ehrenfest wrote a treatise on the subject of Einstein's theory.In the second year (1908), H.Minkowski published an article that fundamentally transformed Einstein's theory into a mathematical form, "greatly simplifying the special theory of relativity".After these several steps, the theoretical revolution turned into a real scientific revolution.Pace (1983, 152) points out that from 1908 onwards, Einstein's reputation and influence increased rapidly. Einstein's academic career began to open up. In the spring of 1909 he rose from humble beginnings as an examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern to assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich, apparently due to his work on the quantum theory of solids.One of Einstein's recommenders wrote that Einstein "is among the greatest of theoretical physicists" (Pace 1982, 185). "For his work on the principles of relativity, he is being extremely widely regarded". On July 8th, 1998, Einstein received an honorary degree from the University of Geneva, and at the same time the chemist W.Ostwald and M.Marie Curie, who only stayed in this position for two years, came to Prague in March 1911 and was promoted to full professor at Karl Ferdinand University in Germany.After working there for 16 months, F.Frank took over the position.Einstein returned to Zurich as a professor of physics at the Polytechnic Institute.

Of course, the difficulties affecting the acceptance of special relativity are mainly conceptual, but there are also experimental obstacles.At the end of his seminal 1905 paper, Einstein derived a formula for the transverse mass of the electron.This formula is so similar to the one in Lorenz's theory that the differences are quickly eliminated.Thus, the two theories give the same result.However, in papers published in 1902 and 1903, Kaufmann pointed out that the results of his experiments differed significantly from the predictions of Lorentz's theory (which also applies to Einstein's theory), and Einstein was indifferent to these results (See Miller 1981, 81-92; 333-334). In 1906, Kaufmann published an article in the Annals of Physics (the same journal where Einstein had published his paper on relativity a year before) summarizing Einstein's view of space-time in detail (Miller 1981, 343), and The Lorentz-Einstein electron theory is explored.He concluded that his own measurements were "incompatible" with the "basic assumptions" of the Lorentz-Einstein theory (see Holden 1973, 189-190; 234-235).Lorenz therefore wrote a letter to Poincare (Miller 1981, 334-3371982, 20-21), saying that his own "mind was exhausted"."Unfortunately," he told Poincaré, his hypothesis "contradicted Kaufmann's new experiments," and he felt "had to abandon it."But Einstein firmly believed that the existence of "systematic error" between experimental data and theory indicates that there are "unnoticed error sources"; new and more accurate experiments will definitely confirm the theory of relativity.Einstein's words have been confirmed, in 1908, A. H．Bucher published new experimental results that fully corresponded to the predictions of Lorenz and Einstein. In 1910, E.Hupka's experiment confirmed this once again.And decisive results were obtained in 1914-1916.Since then, various arguments showing the correctness of the theory of relativity have emerged continuously and are extremely rich.

As experimental evidence emerged, the theory of relativity itself underwent a fundamental restructuring.This work is the work of Professor of Mathematics at the University of Göttingen H.Minkowski did it.Interestingly, Yonkowski taught mathematics to Einstein at the University of Zurich a few years ago. In 1908, Minkowski published a paper, introducing the concept of four-dimensional "space-time", replacing the incompatible concept of isolated three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time, and he also transformed the theory of relativity into the modern tensor form (this requires physical scientists to further study the new mathematical theory established by Rich and Levi-Sivita), introduced technical terms in the theory of relativity, and clearly pointed out: From the perspective of the theory of relativity, the traditional Newtonian gravitational theory is not enough (Pace 1982 , 152).Obviously, Einstein did not understand the significance of Minkowski's work at first, and even thought that writing his theory in tensor form was a "redundant skill" (ibid.).But by 1912, Einstein had finally converted; in 1916, he gratefully acknowledged that Minkowski had made him greatly simplify the transition from special to general relativity.Einstein (1961, 56-57) later highlighted Minkowski's contribution, saying that, without him, "general relativity . . . might still be in its infancy".The English translation often uses the phrase "no further than its longcloths".Although "windel" most commonly means "diaper" in German, the implication here is clearly that, without Minkowski, general relativity must still be in the making.

Minkowski's view of space and time was first published in a lecture on November 5, 1907, entitled "Principles of Relativity".But the speech was not published until 1915, six years after Minkowski's death.However, with the help of two other papers published in 1908 and 1909, Minkowski's space-time conception had spread (Garrison 1979, 89).Minkowski was fully aware of the importance of his contribution.In his 1907 speech he began by saying: "Gentlemen, the idea of ​​space and time which I wish to tell you ... is fundamentally new, ... whereby the isolated idea of ​​space and time itself is doomed to disappear in the shadows among".In fact, Minkowski, in the first draft of this lecture, described the "features" of his new conception of space and time as "revolutionary" and "extremely revolutionary" (ibid., 98).However, when the speech was finally printed, words like "revolutionary" were deleted.

M．Born tells us about his first reading of Einstein's papers, which shows us how esoteric Einstein's concepts were, even to those who had no mathematical problems. In 1907, Born was H.Member of the Minkowski University research class and, therefore, "familiar with relativity ideas and Lorentz transformations".Even so, he recalls, reading Einstein's papers, "Einstein's reasoning exceeded my expectations."Born discovered that "Einstein's theory was entirely new and revolutionary", a creation of genius.Einstein's point of view "proposed a bold challenge to the natural philosophy established by I. Newton and the traditional view of space and time".Now it seems that Born did realize the power of Einstein's thought revolution and theoretical revolution, but he also clearly saw that the real scientific revolution had not yet come.New concepts and new ways of thinking are still being studied, and it will take time for scientists to accept, apply, and make them a common basis for their thinking.Born later made it clear that, in fact, Einstein's theory was so radical, so novel and revolutionary that it required "considerable effort to digest and assimilate well".And he reminds us that "not everyone is able or willing to do this," and it seems he himself did.The Einstein Revolution required the general acceptance of a whole new way of thinking about the physical world. In 1909 the American scientist G.Lewis and R.The article published by Tolman clearly illustrates the practical difficulties of accepting Einstein's hypothesis.They admitted that Einstein's principle of relativity "synthesized a large number of experimental facts, and there were no contradictory counterexamples", among which they cited Bucher's experiment as an important basis to support this theory.However, when they feel that the basic "principle" of the theory of relativity is impeccable, they also feel the problems exposed on the other hand.For example, while the general principle of "absolute motion cannot be observed" expressed understanding, they found the principle of the invariance of the speed of light relative to any independent observer unacceptable (Miller 1981, 251-252).The latter principle, they argued, would lead to "singular conclusions" about the relativity of length and time, which might be "based on some sort of scientific fantasy in the psychology of the senses." As the years passed, more and more physicists finally converted.However, many of them accept only Einstein's formula, admitting that "contractility" is the basis of the space problems caused by the invariance of the speed of light.However, they still cling to beliefs in absolute time and simultaneity (including Lorenz, see Miller 1981, 259). In April 1911, the French physicist B.Langevin's speech at the Congress of Philosophers in Bologna added an even more sensational color to the theory of relativity.Langevin was a brilliant scientist, and Einstein once said that if he hadn't discovered special relativity, Langevin would have discovered it.When discussing the relativity of time or clock slowness, Langevin did not adopt Einstein's convoluted method of using moving clocks and static clocks to explain time effects, but replaced Einstein's theory with the so-called "twin paradox". Stein's "clock paradox" and instantly became a well-known monster arising from the theory of relativity.The time problem of the theory of relativity arises like this: if one pair of twin brothers stays on the earth and the other travels to interstellar space, then when the traveling brother returns to the earth, he will find that his age is different from that of the brother who stayed on the earth. up.Another example given by Langevin is that the traveler flies to a star in a straight line, circles it and returns the same way.If the speed of travel is great enough (certainly less than the speed of light), eventually the traveler will find that in his two years of travel, the earth has passed two long centuries.Philosopher H.Xiang Gesen later admitted that it was Langevin's speech in April 1919 that "first aroused my attention to Einstein's ideas". The clock (or twin) paradox quickly became (and to some extent still is today) the cause of relativity's confusion and even hostility. V．Laue spoke of those who objected to the "thought content," the underlying formulas or mathematical results of relativity. In 1911 he wrote to Einstein that the common arguments against the theory of relativity "are chiefly time relativity and the resulting paradoxes".Laue's first textbook on relativity, written in 1912, states that these paradoxes and other problems of time relativity are of "great philosophical interest" and that for this reason they can only be treated "philosophically" question.We also note that when Einstein discussed this insight in 1911, he used the method of an ideal experiment.He hypothesized that a "box containing a small creature" would be sent on a "distant voyage" so that when it returned to Earth "the interior of the box would be little changed" and that the organisms that remained on Earth would have "populated for many generations" up". Although many people are reluctant to accept Einstein's radical reconstruction of the basic ideas of physics, they are already applying Einstein's mathematical results.Laue (and others) have pointed out that these mathematical results are formally consistent with those of Lorentz's theory, but their physical nature is different.Laue even declared (1911) that the "substantial difference" between the two theories is ineffable.But people soon realized that Einstein's theory was superior, especially after the establishment of the general theory of relativity, the importance of the special theory of relativity was especially revealed. By about 1911, Einstein's special theory of relativity had gained enough adherents that a scientific revolution had occurred.In the same year, A.Sommerfeld declared that the theory of relativity was "well established that it is no longer at the forefront of physics" (Miller 1981, 257). At the beginning of 1912, W. who had just won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Physics.Wien suggested that Einstein and Lorenz should be awarded the highest prize.He wrote in his recommendation letter: From a "logical point of view", the principle of relativity "should be regarded as one of the most important achievements of theoretical physics" (Pace 1982, 153).There is now "experimental and unequivocal confirmation of this theory," he said.He concluded that "Lorentz was the first to discover the mathematical content of the principle of relativity", while Einstein "successfully reduced the theory of relativity to a simple principle". Of course, not all physicists embraced this revolutionary new idea.Van der Waals said in 1912 that it has not yet been explained why mass and length change with velocity (Miller 1981, 258).In addition to the resentment caused by the relativity of time, the denial of absolute length, time and quality has also aroused more fundamental objections, and the "relativity of simultaneity" is also very difficult to accept.It is more difficult, however, to discard the ether concept.If there is no medium support, how can light and other electromagnetic waves exist in space?Such strong opposition and momentum can also be seen as a sign of the revolutionary nature of the new theory. Among the many views against the theory of relativity, Princeton University's W. F．Professor Magee (1912, 293) is representative. In 1919, when he made the inaugural speech of the president of the American Physical Society, he said that the principle of relativity could not meet such a standard: any "really useful ultimate answer...should be understood by everyone, including well-trained scholars and ordinary people. public".For him, the theory of relativity was incomprehensible because it could not be "described in ordinary notions of force, space and time which anyone can understand".But he obviously didn't know how novel Newton's concepts of force and inertia were in 1687!He obviously also didn't understand how few people really understand the "common concepts" of force and concept, except for a few people who have studied theoretical physics! Magee also declared that "the creators of new ideas in the development of the theory of relativity should be asked whether they realize how limited the usefulness of the theory is, and how incapable it is of describing the universe in intelligible terms".He was prepared to "warn them that they had better put away their brilliant theories, unless the principle of relativity could be satisfactorily explained by means of simplifications using ordinary physical concepts". L． T．In 1912, Moore published a review article in the "Nature" magazine (1912, 94: 370-371), summarizing the views in Magee's speech, and made the following remarks on the scientific revolution: Professor Einstein's theory of relativity and Professor Planck's quantum theory have been proclaimed endlessly as the greatest revolution in scientific method since the time of Newton.They used mathematical notation as the basis of science, refused to recognize the underlying solid experimental basis behind mathematical notation, and thus replaced the objective universe with a subjective universe.From this perspective, their approach is undoubtedly revolutionary.The question is, are they going forward or backward in doing so, toward the light or into the dark?The general belief that the revolution initiated by Galileo and Newton relied on the experimental methods of scientists to replace the metaphysical methods of the academics is clearly correct.Now, the so-called new method seems to be just the opposite, so that if there is any intellectual revolution involved here, it is in fact nothing more than a return to the tedious philosophical method of the Middle Ages. About 20 years later, L. T．In his biography of Newton (1933, 333), More (now dean of the Graduate School at the University of Cincinnati) still expresses his distaste for "Einstein's general theory of relativity," which he denounces as "a path to idealism." Philosophy's most daring attempt; such a philosophy is only a logical game of flexible minds, completely ignoring the facts of the objective world; interesting as it may be, but deeply mired in scholasticism".Adhering to relativistic physics (and its philosophy), he concluded, "would lead to the decadence of science degenerating into medieval scholasticism and religious theology".The reader may not be surprised that More disparaged the great developments in mathematics and symbolic logic, writing (ibid., 332), "It is worth noting the fact that two great works, two of which perhaps a scientific mind could do The most ingenious creation ever produced, is now under attack: by modern symbolic logicians; Principia by relativistic physics".His final conclusion is: "After the modernism has been long forgotten, Aristotle and Newton will be revered; The depth of a scientific revolution is directly proportional to the ferocity of the rampant onslaught of conservatism and the fundamental changes it has brought about in scientific thought. general relativity Einstein once said that special relativity would have appeared even if he had not come into this world because "the time was ripe" (Infeld 1950, 46), but not general relativity.He wonders if general relativity "would not have been known" if he hadn't developed it.General relativity has been called the "Second Einsteinian Revolution" (ibid.).It was a giant leap, and just as many physicists came to accept special relativity, it left them behind once again.Planck welcomed special relativity with great enthusiasm and became one of the earliest supporters. He once said to Einstein: "Now everything is settled, why do you bother with other things?" Love Einstein did this because he was a genius, far ahead of his contemporaries.He understood that special relativity was incomplete and failed to solve the problems of acceleration and gravity.He later spoke of the main idea that led to his sudden enlightenment (he once called it "the most exciting thought in his life", see Einstein's recollections cited in Pace 1982, 178.) was November 1907 in Produced while working at the Berne Patent Office.The idea was: "When a person is in free fall, he will not feel his own weight." He said that this "simplest idea" drove him to heaven.He began to study the theory of gravitation, but it was not until 1915 that he published a relatively complete theory of general relativity. In the second year, he published a general theory of relativity that was called "the king's version" by a biographer. The establishment of this theory was mainly based on English. What Feld called "three themes": gravity, the equivalence principle, and the relationship between geometry and physics.The core of the theory is the new gravitational field law and gravitational field equation. Some people say that what Maxwell did on the electromagnetic field, what Einstein did on the gravitational field.One of the striking features of general relativity is the reduction of gravity in Newtonian mechanics to curvature in four-dimensional space-time. J． H-Gines wrote in the entry on relativity in the twelfth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1922: The new scenario of the "cosmic picture" is no longer "the forced vibration of an ether ocean in three-dimensional space", but "four-dimensional A Knot on the Space World Line". General relativity makes three testable predictions.The first is the perturbation of Mercury's perihelion, which indicates that an orbiting planet does not return exactly to its original position in space, but rather moves forward slightly each time it completes a cycle around the Sun.This fact has been discovered as early as the middle of the 19th century, but the classical Newtonian celestial mechanics cannot give a satisfactory explanation for the perturbation phenomenon.The second prediction is that light will be deflected in a gravitational field.According to this statement, when starlight passes near the sun, it will be deflected by the sun's gravitational force.The result is a change in the position of the star.Observing this phenomenon can only be carried out when a total solar eclipse occurs, otherwise the strong light of the sun makes it impossible to observe the light of stars near the sun on the ground (Swiss astronomer M. Schwarzschild made a detailed quantitative analysis of this phenomenon describe).The second prediction is often called a "redshift" of the spectral line, namely that the star's radiation is always directed away from us.This is the three test methods proposed by the general theory of relativity.But we know that it was 1915 at that time, and the smoke of the First World War hung over the scientifically developed countries.Einstein was in Berlin and it was impossible to make any eclipse observations. But Einstein did not stop working. In 1917, he published a paper in the "Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences" entitled "General Relativity Theory of the Universe".Although its conclusions have been discarded, the paper opened up a new field of theoretical physics.Einstein pointed out that "the theory of relativity can shed light on the problem of the structure of our universe ...".Thus was founded the scientific study of cosmology, which transformed the universe from a branch of metaphysics into a part of physics and astrophysics (Infeld 1950, 72; "On Einstein and Cosmology", see Pace 1982, &15). British writer A.Eddington studied Einstein's writings during the war (see Chapter 25), and soon became a devoted believer and ardent propagandist of Einstein's ideas.He later wrote a large number of books, including the authoritative "Report on the Theory of Gravitational Relativity" (1918), the academic work "A Mathematical Theory of Relativity" (1923), two popular works "Space, Time and Gravity" (1920) and "Matter The Nature of the World" (1928), in addition to numerous lectures, articles, and pamphlets. P． A． M．Dirac recalled that it was through Eddington's work that he first encountered the theory of relativity when he was a student at the University of Bristol.More importantly, immediately after the end of the First World War, Eddington organized a British solar eclipse observation team in 1919 to detect the prediction that starlight would be deflected when it passed the total solar eclipse of the sun.The observations, which matched the predictions, immediately shocked scientists and the public around the world. It is difficult today to imagine the boundless excitement of the world's scientific community in 1919.Two observation teams set off separately, one was sent to Sobral in Brazil, and the other was led by Eddington to Principe Island off the coast of Guyana, Spain. In the autumn of 1919, after sorting out and analyzing the observation data, astronomers announced at the joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society held on November 6: "The starlight is indeed deflected according to the prediction of Einstein's theory of gravity. . "The historic meeting was well-covered in both the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society's Profile and the Proceedings of the Royal Society.The famous scientist J. J．Thomson, chairman of the meeting, declared that it was "one of the most important achievements in the theory of gravity since Newton" and "the greatest achievement of human thought."On the next day, November 7, 1919, the British "Times", which has always been rigorous, appeared a striking headline: "Revolution in Science", and the two subheads were "New Theory of the Universe" and "Newton's Concept Overthrown". On November 8, The Times published yet another article on the revolution, entitled "The Scientific Revolution," "Einstein Challenges Newton," "A Distinguished Physicist's Viewpoint."The article tells readers, "This matter has become a hot topic of discussion in the House of Commons"; eminent physicist, member of the Royal Society, Cambridge University J.Professor Larmor was "besieged for an answer as to whether Newton had been defeated and Cambridge had fallen".Newspapers in the Netherlands quickly carried the news. H． A．Lorenz published an article in the "Rotterdam Zeitung" on November 9, and the "New York Times" immediately translated and reproduced it. On November 23, M.Born also published articles in the Frankfurter Dahl. On December 14, a photo of Einstein was published on the cover of the weekly magazine "Berlin Bild". Perney, Kepler, and Newton (Pace 1982, 308).In an article in the December 4 issue of Nature, E.Kunningham pointed out: Einstein's "thoughts were revolutionary." A．Pace (1982, 309) checked headlines or legends about Einstein and relativity in the New York Times index from November 9, 1919. "The Triumph of Einstein's Theory" is linked to "The Book of the Twelve Wise Men" (which speaks of Einstein's warning to publishers that "not many people in the world will understand it").The newspaper published not only the legend but also an editorial, and related articles continued to appear in the paper until December of that year, Pace discovered. From then until Einstein's death, The New York Times did not publish articles about Einstein in a year. Einstein became a legend.When Einstein went to London in 1921, Lord Haldane introduced Einstein to everyone in a lecture at the Royal Academy.Einstein lived in Haldane's villa, and when Einstein came to his house, Haldane's daughter "passed out with excitement" after seeing the famous guest (Pace 1982, 312) .When Haldane introduced Einstein at the Royal Academy of Sciences, he said that before this lecture, Einstein "had visited Newton's tomb at Westminster Abbey". Since then and now, scientists and non-scientists, historians and philosophers have written works linking relativity (in the general and special sense) with "revolution". In 1912, Haldane wrote on this issue in his book The Age of Relativity (Chapter 4): "Einstein initiated a revolution in our conception of physics".For the philosopher K.According to Popper (Whitrow 1967, 25), Einstein "revolutionized physics".Physicist M.Born (1962, 2) and S.Borgia's (1979, 82) expressions are: Einstein's "revolutionary space-time concept" and "Einstein's revolution".Born (1965, 2) also said: "The IM special theory of relativity" is a major event marking the "end of the classical period and the beginning of a new era" in physics. S．Weinberg (1979, 22) believes that Einstein's greatest achievement is that "for the first time, he incorporated time and space into the system of physics, thus breaking away from the shackles of metaphysics".According to the mathematician A.According to Borel (1960, 3), Einstein "not only brought us a new theory of physics, but also taught us a new way of understanding the world".Therefore, "everyone who has studied his theory can no longer think in the way they used to think".Spanish philosopher J. 0．Gasset did not explicitly use the word revolution in his writings, but he declared that Einstein's "theory of relativity is the most important achievement of wisdom today".Thus, while Einstein's theory of relativity created a revolution in physics, it also caused a revolution in philosophy. It turns out that the general theory of relativity satisfies the scientific revolution test proposed in Chapter 3 of this book better than the special theory of relativity.However, the development history of general relativity is more difficult and tortuous than that of special relativity.很长一个时期，只有天文学家（而且只是那些研究宇宙学的天文学家）对广义相对论感兴趣，物理学家则不然，S．温伯格（1981，20）指出："在最基本的层次上研究物质的物理学的全部现代理论，在很大程度上依靠两大支柱"，一是"狭义相对论"，一是"量子力学"。塞格尔（1976，93）在回顾2O年代和30年代物理学家们的活动时，也特别指出："与狭义相对论相对应的广义相对论，目前尚不是物理学家们感兴趣的前沿课题"。这也就是说，广义相对论与狭义相对论不同，它对于当时主要的研究课题如物质理论和辐射理论并不是必须的。例如，在我30年代末攻读物理学研究生时，几乎所有的课程如原子物理学，量子力学甚至一些基础课和专业基础课都涉及到狭义相对论，但只有少数数学家（在G．D．伯克霍夫的激发下）研究广义相对论。另外，广义相对论暗示，建立得最为成功的理论物理学的一个分支——牛顿万有引力理论——犯了一个根本性的错误或说它并不完整，而且广义相对论还引进了"四维时空的弯曲"这一奇特的概念来解释引力。我们应当懂得，伟大的1919年日蚀实验只是定性地说明了光线传播将受引力场的影响，更精确的日蚀实验则是以后的事了。但是，在爱因斯坦最初提出的三项检验方法之外，再找到新的方法可能又要过去数十年。温伯格曾指出，只有在"爱因斯坦建立他的理论40年之后"（温伯格1981，21），才能构想出并完成新的更精确的实验，证实广义相对论。 第二次世界大战结束后的几十年间，世界发生了很大的变化，在实验室进行精确的验证实验已经成为现实。于是，人们对引力的本质，引力与自然界的其它几种基本力（电磁力，强相互作用，弱相互作用）的关系问题产生了新的兴趣。庞大的物理学和天文学"工业"日益兴起，集中研究广义相对论及其在宇宙学和宇宙论研究中的应用。其他的物理学分支也是如此。结果正如S．温伯格所预言的，人们一项重要的共识是，为了"弄懂超短距离的万有引力"，还需要"另一次伟大的飞跃"（1981，24），另一次革命，"建立更加普遍适用的原理"，而目前我们对此还没有任何概念。一句话，广义相对论今天已成为科学家乐此不疲的研究课题，热情之高或许是前所未有的。