1) the equations describing gravity are invariant under all coordinate transformations,
2) energy-momentum is not locally created or destroyed,
3) the equations describing gravity involve only the flow of energy-momentum and the curvature of the spacetime metric (and not powers or products or derivatives of these),
4) the equations reduce to ordinary Newtonian gravity in a suitable limit,
then Einstein’s equations for general relativity are the only possible choice… except for one adjustable parameter, the cosmological constant.
(First Einstein said this constant was nonzero, then he said that was the “biggest mistake in his life”, and then it turned out he was right in the first place. It’s not zero, it’s roughly 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. So, a bit of waffling on this issue is understandable.)
It took Einstein about 10 years of hard work to figure this out, with a lot of help from a mathematician Marcel Grossman who taught him the required math. But by the time he talked to that reporter he knew this stuff. That’s what gave him his confidence.
His assumptions 1)-4) could have been wrong, of course. But he was playing a strong hand of cards—and he knew it.
By the way, he did write a paper where he got the equations wrong and predicted a wrong value for the deflection of starlight by the Earth’s gravitational field. But luckily he caught his mistake before the experiment was done. If he’d caught his mistake afterwards, lots of people would have thought he was just retroactively fudging his theory to fit the data.
Realize his theory was replacing ether theory. As people learned more, ether theory required increasingly arbitrary “patches” to work. If GR was not simpler then Ether theory, it wasn’t a good candidate to replace it, as lorentzian transformations in ether theory still worked mathematically.
Once you assume:
1) the equations describing gravity are invariant under all coordinate transformations,
2) energy-momentum is not locally created or destroyed,
3) the equations describing gravity involve only the flow of energy-momentum and the curvature of the spacetime metric (and not powers or products or derivatives of these),
4) the equations reduce to ordinary Newtonian gravity in a suitable limit,
then Einstein’s equations for general relativity are the only possible choice… except for one adjustable parameter, the cosmological constant.
(First Einstein said this constant was nonzero, then he said that was the “biggest mistake in his life”, and then it turned out he was right in the first place. It’s not zero, it’s roughly 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. So, a bit of waffling on this issue is understandable.)
It took Einstein about 10 years of hard work to figure this out, with a lot of help from a mathematician Marcel Grossman who taught him the required math. But by the time he talked to that reporter he knew this stuff. That’s what gave him his confidence.
His assumptions 1)-4) could have been wrong, of course. But he was playing a strong hand of cards—and he knew it.
By the way, he did write a paper where he got the equations wrong and predicted a wrong value for the deflection of starlight by the Earth’s gravitational field. But luckily he caught his mistake before the experiment was done. If he’d caught his mistake afterwards, lots of people would have thought he was just retroactively fudging his theory to fit the data.
I can see why Einstein would assume 1), 2) and 4), but what was his motivation for assuming 3)? Just some intuition about simplicity?
Realize his theory was replacing ether theory. As people learned more, ether theory required increasingly arbitrary “patches” to work. If GR was not simpler then Ether theory, it wasn’t a good candidate to replace it, as lorentzian transformations in ether theory still worked mathematically.