Cartan, Elie. SIX gravitation papers from 1922, as follows: “Sur une définition géométrique du tenseur d'énergie d'Einstein"; bound with "Sur une généralisation de la notion de courbure de Riemann et les espaces à torsion"; bound with "Sur les espaces généralisés et la théorie de la Relativité"; bound with "Sur les espaces conformes généralisés et l'Univers optique"; bound with "Sur les équations de structure des espaces généralisés et l'éxpression analytique du tenseur d'Einstein", all together in a two-brick-sized volume of the Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de L'Academie des Sciences, volume 174, January-June 1922, with the Cartan papers occupying 437-439, 593-595, 734-737, 857-60, and 1104-1107 in the volume of 1815pp.
ALL with their ORIGINAL FRONT WRAPPERS bound at the end of the volume.
Also offered with a sixth paper:
Cartan, Elie. "Sur un theoreme fondamental de M.H. Weyl dans la theorie de l'espace metrique", in Comptes Rendus, 1922, volume 175, number 2, pp 81-5. This is offered disbound from a larger volume, but with the original front wrapper.
The volume bound in cloth with the previous owner/institution name gilt stamped at the spine bottom (“U.S. Weather Service”). The covers have some general wear and scuffing, and the text is printed on relatively skimpy post-war-affected paper stock (as is the case with the CR for most of the 1920's and into the Depression years of the 1930's). That said, this is a Good Copy. $950
“Cartan was one of the most profound mathematicians of the last hundred years, and his influence is still one of the most decisive in the development of modern mathematics...”--Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Cartan had just attended (on 6 April 1922) the Societe Francaise de la Philosophie (founded in part by Henri Poincare) "for a discussion of the general and special theories of relativity". (Pais, Subtle is the Lord, p. 163) Also in attendance were Hadamard, Painleve, Jean Becquerel, Einstein, , Langevin, Bergson, Meyerson, and numerous others. Pais also points out (on page 340) that via this work that Einstein's "labors had a major impact on mathematics". "...Cartan was the first to introduce nonsymmetric connections...there is considerable interest by general relativitists in theories of this kind, called Einstein-Cartan theories...their main purpose is to link torsion to spin..." (Pais, p 344.)
“Albert Einstein became affiliated with the theory in 1928 during his unsuccessful attempt to match torsion to the electromagnetic field tensor as part of a unified field theory. This line of thought led him to the related but different theory of teleparallelism...Einstein–Cartan theory has been historically overshadowed by its torsion-free counterpart and other alternatives like Brans–Dicke theory because torsion seemed to add little predictive benefit at the expense of the tractability of its equations. Since the Einstein–Cartan theory is purely classical, it also does not fully address the issue of quantum gravity. In the Einstein–Cartan theory, the Dirac equation becomes nonlinear and therefore the superposition principle used in usual quantization techniques would not work. Recently, interest in Einstein–Cartan theory has been driven toward cosmological implications, most importantly, the avoidance of a gravitational singularity at the beginning of the universe. The theory is considered viable and remains an active topic in the physics community.” --Wikipedia entry for Einstein-Cartan Theory, which also identifies the essential papers as “Cartan, E. (1922). Comptes Rendus 174, 437–439, 593–595, 734–737, 857–860, 1104–1107”.
Three of the five papers are referenced in Lecat's Bibliographie de la Relativite (1924) #404-406, pg 18.
_____. ANOTHER Copy, without the original wrappers.
The volume bound in cloth and paper boards, and is from an institutional library in Baltimore, though with very minimal library markers. The text is printed on relatively skimpy post-war-affected paper stock (as is the case with the CR for most of the 1920's and into the Depression years of the 1930's). That said, this is a Very Good Copy. $400
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