Some historical documents, especially the Einstein-Besso manuscript from 1913, an extensive notebook by Hans Thirring from 1917, and a correspondence between Thirring and Albert Einstein in the year 1917 reveal that most of the merit of the so-called Lense-Thirring effect of general relativity belongs to Einstein. Besides this "central story" of the effect, we comment shortly on some type of prehistory, with contributions by Ernst Mach, Benedikt and Immanuel Friedlaender, and August Föppl, and we follow the later history of the problem of a correct centrifugal force inside a rotating mass shell which was resolved only relatively recently. We also shortly comment on recent possibilities to confirm the so-called Lense-Thirring effect, and the related Schiff effect, experimentally.
We consider stationary, axially and equatorially symmetric systems consisting of a central rotating and charged degenerate black hole and surrounding matter. We show that a 2 + Q 2 = M 2 always holds provided that a continuous sequence of spacetimes can be identified, leading from the Kerr-Newman solution in electrovacuum to the solution in question. The quantity a = J /M is the black hole's intrinsic angular momentum per unit mass, Q its electric charge and M is the well-known black hole mass parameter introduced by Christodoulou and Ruffini.
Mach's idea of relativity of rotation is confirmed for a shell-type model of the Universe by showing that flat geometry in rotating coordinates, realising correct Coriolis and centrifugal forces, can be continuously connected through a rotating mass shell with not exactly spherical shape and latitude-dependent mass density to an asymptotically Minkowskian outside metric. The corresponding solutions of Einstein's field equations are given to second order in the angular velocity omega but it is plausible that the problem has a solution to any order of omega .
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