Pseudoscience/Timeline of Relativity

Timeline of Relativity

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein presented the theories of special relativity and general relativity in publications that either contained no formal references to previous literature, or referred only to a small number of his predecessors for fundamental results on which he based his theories, most notably to the work of Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz for special relativity, and to the work of David Hilbert, Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and Ernst Mach for general relativity.

Subsequently, claims have been put forward about both theories, asserting that they were formulated, either wholly or in part, by others before Einstein. At issue is the extent to which Einstein and various other individuals should be credited for the formulation of these theories, based on priority considerations.

Various scholars have questioned aspects of the work of Einstein, Poincaré, and Lorentz leading up to the theories’ publication in 1905. Questions raised by these scholars include asking to what degree Einstein was familiar with Poincaré's work, whether Einstein was familiar with Lorentz's 1904 paper or a review of it, and how closely Einstein followed other physicists at the time.

It is known that Einstein was familiar with Poincaré's 1902 paper [Poi02], but it is not known to what extent he was familiar with other work of Poincaré in 1905. However, it is known that he knew [Poi00] in 1906, because he quoted it in [Ein06]. Lorentz's 1904 paper [Lor04] contained the transformations bearing his name that appeared in the Annalen der Physik.

Some authors claim that Einstein worked in relative isolation and with restricted access to the physics literature in 1905. Others, however, disagree; a personal friend of Einstein, Maurice Solovine, acknowledged that he and Einstein pored over Poincaré's 1902 book, keeping them "breathless for weeks on end" [Rot06]. The question of whether Einstein's wife Mileva Marić contributed to Einstein's work has also been raised, but most scholars on the topic say that there is no substantive evidence that she made significant contributions.

Year	Person	Event
1846	Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams	studying Uranus' orbit, independently prove that another, farther planet must exist. Neptune was found at the predicted moment and position.
1855	Le Verrier	observes a 35 arcsecond per century excess precession of Mercury's orbit and attributes it to another planet, inside Mercury's orbit. The planet was never found. See Vulcan.
1876	William Kingdon Clifford	suggests that the motion of matter may be due to changes in the geometry of space
1882	Simon Newcomb	observes a 43 arcsecond per century excess precession of Mercury's orbit
1887	Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley	their famous experiment do not detect the ether drift.
1889	Loránd Eötvös	uses a torsion balance to test the weak equivalence principle to 1 part in one billion.
1893	Ernst Mach	states Mach's principle; first constructive attack on the idea of Newtonian absolute space
1898	Henri Poincaré	states that simultaneity is relative.
1899	Hendrik Antoon Lorentz	published the Lorentz transformations.1902 – Paul Gerber explains the movement of the perihelion of Mercury using finite speed of gravity. His formula, at least approximately, matches the later model from Einstein's general relativity, but Gerber's theory was incorrect.
1904	Henri Poincaré	presents the principle of relativity for electromagnetism
1905	Albert Einstein	completes his special theory of relativity and discovers the equivalence of mass and energy,
1907	Albert Einstein	introduces the principle of equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass and uses it to predict gravitational lensing and gravitational redshift, historically known as the Einstein shift.
1907-9	Hermann Minkowski	introduces the Minkowski spacetime. His paper was published posthumously.
1909	Max Born	proposes his notion of rigidity.
1909	Paul Ehrenfest	states the Ehrenfest paradox.
1911	Albert Einstein	explains the need to replace both special relativity and Newton's theory of gravity; he realizes that the principle of equivalence only holds locally, not globally.
1915-16	Albert Einstein	completes his general theory of relativity. He explains the perihelion of Mercury and calculates gravitational lensing correctly and introduces the post-Newtonian approximation.
1915	David Hilbert	introduces Hilbert's action principle, another way of deriving the Einstein field equations of general relativity. Hilbert also recognizes the connection between the Einstein equations and the Gauss-Bonnet theorem.
1916	Karl Schwarzschild	publishes the Schwarzschild metric about a month after Einstein published his general theory of relativity. This was the first solution to the Einstein field equations other than the trivial flat space solution.
1916	Albert Einstein	predicts gravitational waves.
1916	Willem de Sitter	predicts the geodetic effect.
1917	Albert Einstein	applies his field equations to the entire Universe. Physical cosmology is born.
1916-20	Arthur Eddington	studies the internal constitution of the stars.
1918	Albert Einstein	derives the quadrupole formula for gravitational radiation.
1918	Josef Lense and Hans Thirring	find the gravitomagnetic frame-dragging of gyroscopes in the equations of general relativity.
1919	Arthur Eddington	leads a solar eclipse expedition which detects gravitational deflection of light by the Sun, which, despite opinion to the contrary, survives modern scrutiny. Other teams fail for reasons of war and politics.
1921	Theodor Kaluza	demonstrates that a five-dimensional version of Einstein's equations unifies gravitation and electromagnetism. This idea is later extended by Oskar Klein.
1922	Alexander Friedmann	derives the Friedmann equations.
1922	Enrico Fermi	introduces the Fermi coordinates.
1923	George David Birkhoff	roves Birkhoff's theorem on the uniqueness of the Schwarzschild solution.
1924	Arthur Eddington	calculates the Eddington limit.
1925	Walter Adams	measures the gravitational redshift of the light emitted by the companion of Sirius B, a white dwarf.
1927	Georges Lemaître	publishes his hypothesis of the primeval atom.
1929	Edwin Hubble	published the law later named for him.
1931	Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar	studies the stability of white dwarfs.
1931	Georges Lemaître and Arthur Eddington	predict the expansion of the Universe.
1931	Albert Einstein	introduces his cosmological constant.
1932	Albert Einstein and Willem de Sitter	propose the Einstein-de Sitter cosmological model.
1934	Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky	predict the existence of neutron stars. Although their details are wrong, their basic idea is now accepted.
1935	Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen	derive the Einstein-Rosen bridge, the first wormhole solution.
1936	Albert Einstein	predicts that a gravitational lens brightens the light coming from a distant object to the observer.
1937	Fritz Zwicky	states that galaxies could act as gravitational lenses.
1937	Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen	obtain the Einstein-Rosen metric, the first exact solution describing gravitational waves.
1938	Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld, and Banesh Hoffmann	obtain the Einstein-Infeld-Hoffmann equations of motion.
1939	Hans Bethe	shows that nuclear fusion is responsible for energy production inside stars, building upon the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism.
1939	Richard Tolman	solves the Einstein field equations in the case of a spherical fluid drop.
1939	Robert Serber, George Volkoff, Richard Tolman, and J. Robert Oppenheimer	study the stability of neutron stars, obtaining the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit.
1939	J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder	publish the Oppenheimer-Snyder model for the continued gravitational contraction of a star.
1948	Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman	predict the Cosmic microwave background (CMB).
1949	Cornelius Lanczos	introduces the Lanczos potential for the Weyl tensor.
1949	Kurt Gödel	discovers Gödel's solution.
1953	P. C. Vaidya	Newtonian time in general relativity
1954	Suraj Gupta	sketches how to derive the equations of general relativity from quantum field theory for a massless spin-2 particle (the graviton). His procedure was later carried out by Stanley Deser in 1970.
1955-56	Robert Kraichnan	shows that under the appropriate assumptions, Einstein's field equations of gravitation arise from the quantum field theory of a massless spin-2 particle coupled to the stress-energy tensor. This follows from his unpublished work as an undergraduate in 1947.
1956	Bruno Berlotti	develops the post-Minkowskian expansion.
1956	John Lighton Synge	publishes the first relativity text emphasizing spacetime diagrams and geometrical methods.
1957	Felix A. E. Pirani	uses Petrov classification to understand gravitational radiation
1957	Richard Feynman	introduces his sticky bead argument. He later derives the quadrupole formula in a letter to Victor Weisskopf (1961)
1957	John Wheeler	discusses the breakdown of classical general relativity near singularities and the need for quantum gravity.
1958	David Finkelstein	presents a new coordinate system that eliminates the Schwarzschild radius as a singularity.
1959	Robert Pound and Glen Rebka	propose the Pound–Rebka experiment, first precision test of gravitational redshift. The experiment relies on the Mössbauer effect.
1959	Lluís Bel	introduces Bel–Robinson tensor and the Bel decomposition of the Riemann tensor.
1959	Arthur Komar	introduces the Komar mass.
1959	Richard Arnowitt, Stanley Deser and Charles W. Misner	developed ADM formalism.
1960	Martin Kruskal and George Szekeres	independently introduce the Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates for the Schwarzschild vacuum.
1960	John Graves and Dieter Brill	study the causal structure of an electrically charged black hole.
1960	Thomas Matthews and Allan R. Sandage	associate 3C 48 with a point-like optical image, show radio source can be at most 15 light minutes in diameter,
1960	Ivor M. Robinson and Andrzej Trautman	discover the Robinson-Trautman null dust solution
1960	Robert Pound and Glen Rebka	test the gravitational redshift predicted by the equivalence principle to approximately 1%.
1961	Tullio Regge	introduces the Regge calculus.
1961	Carl H. Brans and Robert H. Dicke	introduce Brans–Dicke theory, the first viable alternative theory with a clear physical motivation.
1961	Pascual Jordan and Jürgen Ehlers	develop the kinematic decomposition of a timelike congruence,
1961	Robert Dicke, Peter Roll, and R. Krotkov	refine the Eötvös experiment to an accuracy of 10−11.
1962	John Wheeler and Robert Fuller	show that the Einstein-Rosen bridge is unstable.
1962	Roger Penrose and Ezra T. Newman	introduce the Newman–Penrose formalism.
1962	Ehlers and Wolfgang Kundt	classify the symmetries of Pp-wave spacetimes.
1962	Joshua Goldberg and Rainer K. Sachs	prove the Goldberg–Sachs theorem.
1962	Ehlers	introduces Ehlers transformations, a new solution generating method
1962	Richard Arnowitt, Stanley Deser, and Charles W. Misner	introduce the ADM reformulation and global hyperbolicity
1962	Istvan Ozsvath and Englbert Schücking	rediscover the circularly polarized monochromomatic gravitational wave
1962	Hans Adolph Buchdahl	discovers Buchdahl's theorem
1962	Hermann Bondi	introduces Bondi mass
1962	Hermann Bondi, M. G. van der Burg, A. W. Metzner, and Rainer K. Sachs	introduce the asymptotic symmetry group of asymptotically flat, Lorentzian spacetimes at null (i.e., light-like) infinity.
1963	Roy Kerr	discovers the Kerr vacuum solution of Einstein's field equations
1963		Redshifts of 3C 273 and other quasars show they are very distant; hence very luminous
1963	Newman, T. Unti and L.A. Tamburino	introduce the NUT vacuum solution
1963	Roger Penrose	introduces Penrose diagrams and Penrose limits.
1963		First Texas Symposium on e term "'quasar" for quRelativistic Astrophysics held in Dallas, 16–18 December.
1964	Steven Weinberg	shows that a quantum field theory of interacting massless spin-2 particles is Lorentz invariant only if it satisfies the principle of equivalence.
1964	Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar	determines a stability criterion.
1964	R. W. Sharp and Misner	introduce the Misner–Sharp mass.
1964	Hong-Yee Chiu	coins thasi-stellar radio sources.
1964	Sjur Refsdal	suggests that the Hubble constant could be determined using gravitational lensing.
1964	Irwin Shapiro	predicts a gravitational time delay of radiation travel as a test of general relativity.
1965	Roger Penrose	proves first of the singularity theorems.
1965	Newman and others	discover the Kerr–Newman electrovacuum solution
1965	Penrose	discovers the structure of the light cones in gravitational plane wave spacetimes
1965	Ezra Newman and others	introduce Kerr-Newman metric.
1965	Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson	discover the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation
1965	Joseph Weber	puts the first Weber bar gravitational wave detector into operation.
1966	Sachs and Ronald Kantowski	discover the Kantowski-Sachs dust solution.
1967	John Archibald Wheeler	popularizes "black hole" at a conference.
1967	Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish	discover pulsars.
1967	Robert H. Boyer and R. W. Lindquist	introduce Boyer–Lindquist coordinates for the Kerr vacuum.
1967	Bryce DeWitt	publishes on canonical quantum gravity.
1967	Werner Israel	proves the no-hair theorem, and the converse of Birkhoff's theorem.
1967	Kenneth Nordtvedt	develops PPN formalism
1967	Mendel Sachs	publishes factorization of Einstein's field equations
1967	Hans Stephani	discovers the Stephani dust solution
1968	F. J. Ernst	discovers the Ernst equation
1968	B. Kent Harrison	discovers the Harrison transformation, a solution-generating method
1968	Brandon Carter	solves the geodesic equations for Kerr–Newmann electrovacuum with Carter's constant.
1968	Hugo D. Wahlquist	discovers the Wahlquist fluid
1968	Irwin Shapiro and his colleagues	present the first detection of the Shapiro delay.
1968	Kenneth Nordtvedt	studies a possible violation of the weak equivalence principle for self-gravitating bodies and proposes a new test of the weak equivalence principle based on observing the relative motion of the Earth and Moon in the Sun's gravitational field.
1969	William B. Bonnor	introduces the Bonnor beam.
1969	Joseph Weber	reports observation of gravitational waves a claim now generally discounted.
1969	Penrose	proposes the (weak) cosmic censorship hypothesis and the Penrose process
1969	Misner	introduces the mixmaster universe.
1969	Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat and Robert Geroch	discuss global aspects of the Cauchy problem in general relativity.
1965-70	Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and colleagues	develops the post-Newtonian expansions.
1968-70	Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, and George Ellis	prove that singularities must arise in the Big Bang models.
1970	Vladimir A. Belinskiǐ, Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov, and Evgeny Lifshitz	introduce the BKL conjecture.
1970	Hawking and Penrose	prove trapped surfaces must arise in black holes.
1970		the Kinnersley-Walker photon rocket.
1970	Peter Szekeres	introduces colliding plane waves.
1971	Alfred Goldhaber and Michael Nieto	give stringent limits on the photon mass.
1971	Stephen W. Hawking	proves the area theorem for black holes.
1971	Peter C. Aichelburg and Roman U. Sexl	introduce the Aichelburg–Sexl ultraboost.
1971		Introduction of the Khan–Penrose vacuum, a simple explicit colliding plane wave spacetime.
1971	Robert H. Gowdy	introduces the Gowdy vacuum solutions (cosmological models containing circulating gravitational waves).
1971		Cygnus X-1, the first solid black hole candidate, discovered by Uhuru satellite.
1971	William H. Press	discovers black hole ringing by numerical simulation.
1971	Harrison and Estabrook	algorithm for solving systems of PDEs.
1971	James W. York	introduces conformal method generating initial data for ADM initial value formulation.
1971	Robert Geroch	introduces Geroch group and a solution generating method.
1972	Jacob Bekenstein	proposes that black holes have a non-decreasing entropy which can be identified with the area.
1972	Sachs	introduces optical scalars and proves peeling theorem.
1972	Rainer Weiss	proposes concept of interferometric gravitational wave detector in an unpublished manuscript.
1972	Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating	perform the Hafele–Keating experiment.
1972	Richard H. Price	studies gravitational collapse with numerical simulations.
1972	Saul Teukolsky	derives the Teukolsky equation.
1972	Yakov B. Zel'dovich	predicts the transmutation of electromagnetic and gravitational radiation.
1972	Brandon Carter, Stephen Hawking, and James M. Bardeen	propose the four laws of black hole mechanics
1972	James Bardeen	calculates the shadow of a black hole. This was later verified by the Event Horizon Telescope.
1973	Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John A. Wheeler	publish the treatise Gravitation, a textbook that remains in use in the twenty-first century.
1973	Stephen W. Hawking and George Ellis	publish the monograph The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time.
1973	Robert Geroch	introduces the GHP formalism
1973	Homer Ellis	obtains the Ellis drainhole, the first traversable wormhole.
1974	Russell Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr.	discover the Hulse–Taylor binary pulsar
1974	James W. York and Niall Ó Murchadha	present the analysis of the initial value formulation and examine the stability of its solutions
1974	R. O. Hansen	introduces Hansen–Geroch multipole moments
1974	Stephen Hawking	discovers Hawking radiation.
1974	Stephen Hawking	shows that the area of a black hole is proportional to its entropy, as previously conjectured by Jacob Bekenstein
1975	Roberto Colella, Albert Overhauser, and Samuel Werner	observe the quantum-mechanical phase shift of neutrons due to gravity. Neutron interferometry was later used to test the principle of equivalence
1975	Chandrasekhar and Steven Detweiler	compute quasinormal modes.
1975	Szekeres and D. A. Szafron	discover the Szekeres–Szafron dust solutions.
1976	Penrose	introduces Penrose limits (every null geodesic in a Lorentzian spacetime behaves like a plane wave)
1978	Penrose	introduces the notion of a thunderbolt
1978	Belinskiǐ and Zakharov	show how to solve Einstein's field equations using the inverse scattering transform; the first gravitational solitons
1979	Dennis Walsh, Robert Carswell, and Ray Weymann	discover the gravitationally lensed quasar Q0957+561.
1979	Jean-Pierre Luminet	creates an image of a black hole with an accretion disk using computer simulation.
1979-81	Richard Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau	prove the positive mass theorem. Edward Witten independently proves the same thing.
1980	Vera Rubin and colleagues	study the rotational properties of UGC 2885, demonstrating the prevalence of dark matter.
1980		Gravity Probe A verifies gravitational redshift to approximately 0.007% using a space-born hydrogen maser.
1980	James Bardeen	explains structure in the Universe using cosmological perturbation theory.
1981	Alan Guth	proposes cosmic inflation in order to solve the flatness and horizon problems.
1982	Joseph Taylor and Joel Weisberg	show that the rate of energy loss from the binary pulsar PSR B1913+16 agrees with that predicted by the general relativistic quadrupole formula to within 5%.
1986	Helmut Friedrich	proves that the de Sitter spacetime is stable.
1986	Bernard Schutz	hows that cosmic distances can be determined using sources of gravitational waves without references to the cosmic distance ladder. Standard-siren astronomy is born.
1988	Mike Morris, Kip Thorne, and Yurtsever Ulvi	obtain the Morris-Thorne wormhole. Morris and Thorne argue for its pedagogical value.
1989	Steven Weinberg	discusses the cosmological constant problem, the discrepancy between the measured value and those predicted by modern theories of elementary particles.
1992	Stephen Hawking	states his chronology protection conjecture.
1993	Demetrios Christodoulou and Sergiu Klainerman	prove the non-linear stability of the Minkowski spacetime.
1995	John F. Donoghue	show that general relativity is a quantum effective field theory. This framework could be used to analyze binary systems observed by gravitational-wave observatories.
1995		Hubble Deep Field image taken, It is a landmark in the study of cosmology.
1998		The first complete Einstein ring, B1938+666, discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope and MERLIN.
1996-98		RELIKT-1 and COBE identify anisotropy in the Cosmic microwave background (CMB).
1998-99		Scientists discover that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.
1999	Alessandra Buonanno and Thibault Damour	introduce the effective one-body formalism. This was later used to analyze data collected by gravitational-wave observatories.
2003	Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin	prove the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem.
2002		First data collection of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
2002	James Williams, Slava Turyshev, and Dale Boggs	conduct stringent lunar test of violations of the principle of equivalence.
2005	Daniel Holz and Scott Hughes	coin the term "standard sirens".
2009		Gravity Probe B experiment verifies the geodetic effect to 0.5%.