Einstein's Apple: His First Principle of Equivalence

Abstract

After a historical discussion of Einstein's 1907 principle of equivalence, a homogeneous gravitational field in Minkowski spacetime is constructed. It is pointed out that the reference frames in gravitational theory can be understood as spaces with a flat connection and torsion defined through teleparallelism. This kind of torsion was introduced by Einstein in 1928. The concept of torsion is discussed through simple examples and some historical observations.

41 pages, 12 figures, LaTeX + legacy/pictex ; V3 adds a footnote to the title indicating inclusion of the text as chapters in a book and includes the diagrams in the main file

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