Albert Einstein's generalized theory of gravitation was an attempt to ascertain a universal law of gravitation and the electromagnetic force as a unified field theory.

Description

Einstein attempted the unification and simplification of the fundamental forces. In 1950, he described his work in a Scientific American article. Einstein was guided by the belief of a single statistical measure of variance for the entire set of physical laws and he investigated the similar properties of the electromagnetics and gravity forces, as they are infinite and obey the inverse-square law.

Particles appear in his research as a limited region in space in which the field strength or the energy density are particularly high. Einstein treated subatomic particles in this research as objects embedded in the unified field, influencing it and existing as an essential constituent of the unified field but not of it. Einstein also investigated a natural generalization of symmetrical tensor fields, treating the combination of two parts of the field as being a natural procedure of the total field and not the symmetrical and antisymmetrical parts separately. He researched a way to delineate the equations to be derived from a variational principle.

Results and aftermath

Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research over a Generalized Theory of Gravitation (being characterized as a "mad scientist" in these endeavors) and was ultimately unsuccessful in his attempts at constructing a theory that would unify General Relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein never fully developed the Unified Field Theory, nor has any physicist or researcher in the fifty-odd years since it was first postulated.

See also

• Fundamental interaction
• Philadelphia Experiment

External links and references

• Einstein, Albert, "Manuscript notes much oerwritten, in German, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation". April, 1950.