Lessons from Einstein's 1915 discovery of general relativity
arXiv:1512.07551
Abstract
There is a myth that Einstein's discovery of general relativity was due to his following beautiful mathematics to discover new insights about nature. I argue that this is an incorrect reading of the history and that what Einstein did was to follow physical insights which arose from asking that the story we tell of how nature works be coherent.
This is an expanded version of a text that was originally prepared for, and its Polish translation appeared in, the September 2015 issue of Niezbednik inteligenta. An extract also appears in the Fall/Winter 2015/2016 edition of Inside the Perimeter. Latex 14 pages