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What Day Was Einstein's presentation of general relativity?

Einstein's presentation of general relativity

Thursday, 11/25/1915

About this date

Albert Einstein presented the final form of his general theory of relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, completing a intense period of work that had begun years earlier and reformulating gravity as the curvature of spacetime rather than a force acting at a distance.

The theory would later be confirmed observationally, notably through Arthur Eddington's 1919 measurement of starlight bending during a solar eclipse, an event that brought Einstein worldwide fame.

Einstein had actually raced a rival mathematician, David Hilbert, to complete the final field equations in the days just before this presentation, a lesser-known priority dispute historians still debate the details of.

General relativity's predictions, including gravitational time dilation, are today directly accounted for in the GPS satellite system's clock corrections — without them, GPS location accuracy would drift by several kilometers per day.

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