Search results for "Einstein"

Classical and relativistic n-body problem: from Levi-Civita to the most advanced interplanetary missions

2022

The n-body problem is one of the most important issue in Celestial Mechanics. This article aims to retrace the historical and scientific events that led the Paduan mathematician, Tullio Levi-Civita, to deal with the problem first from a classic and then a relativistic point of view. We describe Levi-Civita's contributions to the theory of relativity focusing on his epistolary exchanges with Einstein, on the problem of secular acceleration and on the proof of Brillouin's cancellation principle. We also point out that the themes treated by Levi-Civita are very topical. Specifically, we analyse how the mathematical formalism used nowadays to test General Relativity can be found in Levi-Civita'…

Debating Relativistic Cosmology, 1917–1924

2018

Physical astronomy as we know it today matured during the latter half of the twentieth century. It was preceded by a period Jean Eisenstaedt has dubbed the “low water mark” in general relativity (GR), covering roughly the period 1925 to 1955 (Eisenstaedt 1988b). Starting in the 1960s, however, a series of startling developments helped pave the way for what has since been called the “renaissance of general relativity,” which suddenly took on great significance for astrophysics and cosmology. In the days of Einstein and Eddington, one could imagine a gravitational field so strong that it would produce a black hole, a true space–time singularity. People talked about such things, but hardly any…

Max von laue’s role in the relativity revolution

2008

Whereas countless studies have been devoted to Einstein’s work on relativity, the contributions of several other major protagonists have received comparatively little attention. Within the immediate German context, no single figure played a more important role in developing the consequences of the special theory of relativity (SR) than Max von Laue (1879–1960). Although remembered today mainly for his discovery of x-ray diffraction in 1912 – an achievement for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize – Laue’s accomplishments in promoting the theory of relativity were of crucial importance. They began early, well before most physicists even knew anything about a mysterious Swiss theoretician nam…

Matter, quantum gravity, and adiabatic phase

1990

Based on the observation that particle masses are much smaller than the Planck mass, a framework for the matter-gravity system in which matter follows gravitation adiabatically is examined in a path-integral approach. It is found that the equations that the resulting gravitational wave function satisfies involve, in addition to the expectation value of the matter stress tensor, an adiabatically induced gauge field which can lead to interesting topological structures in superspace. Such a non-trivial geometric contribution modifies the semiclassical quantization condition and can change the conserved quantities associated with the symmetries of the system. © 1990 The American Physical Societ…

Soldner, Einstein, gravitational light deflection and factors of two

2021

Einstein’s gravitational field equations and the bianchi identities

2002

In his highly acclaimed biography of Einstein, Abraham Pais gave a fairly detailed analysis of the many difficulties his hero had to overcome in November 1915 before he finally arrived at generally covariant equations for gravitation (Pais 1982, 250–261).

Nonlinear dynamics of spinning bosonic stars: formation and stability

2019

We perform numerical evolutions of the fully non-linear Einstein-(complex, massive)Klein-Gordon and Einstein-(complex)Proca systems, to assess the formation and stability of spinning bosonic stars. In the scalar/vector case these are known as boson/Proca stars. Firstly, we consider the formation scenario. Starting with constraint-obeying initial data, describing a dilute, axisymmetric cloud of spinning scalar/Proca field, gravitational collapse towards a spinning star occurs, via gravitational cooling. In the scalar case the formation is transient, even for a non-perturbed initial cloud; a non-axisymmetric instability always develops ejecting all the angular momentum from the scalar star. I…

EINSTEIN–PLANCK FORMULA, EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE, AND BLACK HOLE RADIANCE

2005

The presence of gravity implies corrections to the Einstein-Planck formula $E=h \nu$. This gives hope that the divergent blueshift in frequency, associated to the presence of a black hole horizon, could be smoothed out for the energy. Using simple arguments based on Einstein's equivalence principle we show that this is only possible if a black hole emits, in first approximation, not just a single particle, but thermal radiation.

Numerical observation of Hawking radiation from acoustic black holes in atomic Bose–Einstein condensates

2008

We report numerical evidence of Hawking emission of Bogoliubov phonons from a sonic horizon in a flowing one-dimensional atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. The presence of Hawking radiation is revealed from peculiar long-range patterns in the density-density correlation function of the gas. Quantitative agreement between our fully microscopic calculations and the prediction of analog models is obtained in the hydrodynamic limit. New features are predicted and the robustness of the Hawking signal against a finite temperature discussed.

f(R) constant-roll inflation

2017

The previously introduced class of two-parametric phenomenological inflationary models in General Relativity in which the slow-roll assumption is replaced by the more general, constant-roll condition is generalized to the case of $f(R)$ gravity. A simple constant-roll condition is defined in the original Jordan frame, and exact expressions for a scalaron potential in the Einstein frame, for a function $f(R)$ (in the parametric form) and for inflationary dynamics are obtained. The region of the model parameters permitted by the latest observational constraints on the scalar spectral index and the tensor-to-scalar ratio of primordial metric perturbations generated during inflation is determin…