This book gives an up-to-date detailed account of knowledge of the Lense-
Thirring effect and its implications for physics and astrophysics.
Einstein's theory of General Relativity, born in 1916 as a purely theoretical
work with a splendid mathematical formalism and feeble experimental
verifications, is today becoming more and more the theoretical driving force of one of the
largest observational and experimental programs in the history of science.
Involving discoveries in relativity, cosmology, astronomy and astroparticle physics, this
great adventure reflects the enormous investments since the 1960s in a whole suite
of new technologies especially, but not exclusively, in space.
One grand example of these broad-ranging developments is the Lense-Thirring
effect. Starting from a profound intuition of Lense and Thirring in 1918, based
on a simple solution of the linearized Einstein field equations, this has emerged in
the past four decades as a phenomenon of extraordinary importance in cosmology,
radio jets in quasars, and the physics of neutron stars and black holes, besides
leading to some of the most sophisticated experiments ever performed in the space
surrounding our planet Earth.