DROSTE, Johannes. Het zwaartekrachtsveld van een op meer lichamen volgens de theorie van Einstein. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1916. original grey wrappers, 4to, xii + 72 pp.; very good copy, uncut, wrappers slightly discolored at the edges
Rare copy of Johannes Droste’s PhD thesis on general relativity submitted to H.A. Lorentz in 1916, containing the first introduction of the concept of gravitational repulsion. After Einstein completed his formulation of general relativity on 25 November 1915, Droste calculated the motion of a particle in what we call today the Schwarzschild field and found that highly relativistic particles experience gravitational repulsion. Einstein was familiar with Droste’s thesis, saying it is “good”. To the Dutch scientist, we also owe a thorough analysis of geodesic orbits around a spherically symmetric mass and the introduction of the tortoise coordinate.
