Einstein on Special and General Relativity: did he understand his own theories?
Harvey Brown
University of Oxford
Einstein came to reject his 1905 formulation of special relativity, and never accepted the geometric nature of Minkowski's formulation of the theory. He claimed that general relativity was no more geometric than classical electrodynamics, and that the existence of a gravitational field is coordinate-dependent. I will argue that for the most part he was right.