>>12876060>Hilbert was the first to actually come up with General Relativity. BULLSHIT. In the case of general relativity Einstein did all the work, and he did nearly all the work in complete isolation, except for the last months of 1915, when he was competing very intensely with Hilbert and Noether to make the final form of the theory. By Nov 1915, he had the vacuum equations, certainly without any input from Hilbert, and he used these to calculate the perihelion advance of mercury (getting the right answer) and the deflection of light from the sun (doubling his earlier answer). These equations he already considered in 1914, but rejected, because of the infamous "hole argument". Einstein realized the hole argument was wrong in 1915, but Hilbert's letters to Einstein still repeat the hole argument nonsense, so Hilbert wasn't further along.
Hilbert in Nov 1915 was rushing to follow, sending Einstein pre-prints with his ideas. The preprints annoy Einstein, who feels that Hilbert has done nothing significantly new. Einstein gets the field equations with sources at the end of 1915, with the term that is controversial, and Hilbert gets the same equation with the same term in a paper at the start of 1916 (in pre-print with Einstein's paper), except Hilbert has the action principle, and Einstein does it from the field equations. Both methods work, but it seems Hilbert made a mistake in the trace term, which wouldn't be significant, except people sometimes say Einstein stole the trace term from Hilbert. This is completely ridiculous-- Einstein found the coefficient of the trace term by insisting that the Bianci identity enforce the conservation of stress-energy in a free-falling frame, while Hilbert found the trace term (with supposedly a wrong coefficient, which he fixed in draft) using the action.
So the convention today is that it's Einstein's field equations and it's the Einstein Hilbert action, and this is as it should be.
