How Einstein Got His Field Equations

We study the pages in Albert Einstein's 1916 landmark paper in the Annalen der Physik where he derived his field equations for gravity. Einstein made two heuristic and physically insightful steps. The first was to obtain the field equations in vacuum in a rather geometric fashion. The second step was obtaining the field equations in the presence of matter from the field equations in vacuum. (This transition is an essential principle in physics, much as the principle of local gauge invariance in quantum field theory.) To this end, we go over some quick differential geometric background related to curvilinear coordinates, vectors, tensors, metric tensor, Christoffel symbols, Riemann curvature tensor, Ricci tensor, and see how Einstein used geometry to model gravity.