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Building the General Relativity and Gravitation Community During the Cold War pp 7–21Cite as

The Renaissance of General Relativity: A New Perspective

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Abstract

This chapter presents a general historiographical framework for interpreting the renaissance of general relativity as a consequence of the interplay between internal and environmental factors. The internal factors refer to the resilient theoretical framework provided by general relativity to physicists working in diverse and dispersed fields. The external factors relate to the changing working conditions of physicists in the post-World War II period, with the newly created conditions for the mobility of young researchers, for the transfer of knowledge in a growing international community, and for the self-organization of an identifiable community. These external factors created a favorable environment for integrating the dispersed research endeavors under the new heading of “General Relativity and Gravitation” research. This, in turn, provided the conditions for the emergence of a coherent investigation of the theoretical core of general relativity for its own sake and for the creation of a community specifically dedicated to this goal.

This chapter is based on the historiographical framework developed in Blum et al. (2015).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a review of these discoveries and their consequences, see Longair (2006). See also Peebles (2017) for a thorough discussion on the evolution of the experimental work in the field of gravitation from the late 1950s to the late 1960s—a period that Peebles calls the “naissance” of experimental gravity physics.

  2. 2.

    See also the study published in Eisenstaedt (2006. p. 248).

  3. 3.

    A very meticulous study of this demographic transformation in the United States was conducted by Kaiser (2012).

  4. 4.

    This kind of process might be considered a fundamental part of the concept of scientific revolution as defined in Kuhn (1970).

  5. 5.

    Even the mathematically minded physicist Pascual Jordan complained about the “mismatch between the simplicity of the physical and epistemological foundations and the annoying complexity of the corresponding thicket of formulae” (Jordan 1955, p. 5, translated in Blum et al. 2017, p. 96).

  6. 6.

    On the dissemination of the Feynman diagrams and their role in the evolution of theoretical physics, see Kaiser (2005).

  7. 7.

    Ezra Newman and Roger Penrose, 13 December 2013, interview with Alexander Blum, Jürgen Renn, and Donald Salisbury; and Dieter Brill and Charles Misner, 13 December 2013, interview with Alexander Blum, and Donald Salisbury. I am very grateful to Alexander Blum, Jürgen Renn, and Donald Salisbury for having provided the records of these interviews.

  8. 8.

    See George Gale, “Cosmology: Methodological Debates in the 1930s and 1940s,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/cosmology-30s/. Accessed 21 September 2016.

  9. 9.

    There were a few exceptions, however. Following some developments, the program of unified field theory was revitalized in the period 1929 to 1930 and unified theory also became one of the main topics at the first Soviet All-Union Conference on Theoretical Physics in Kharkov, Ukraine (Goldstein and Ritter 2003). Shortly afterwards, the program seemed be peripheral again (see Vizgin and Gorelik 1987, p. 312).

  10. 10.

    I am referring in particular to the definition of a scientific field from the perspective of a collaboration network (see, e.g., Bettencourt et al. 2008).

  11. 11.

    Kaiser (2005) studied this process in the context of the diffusion of the Feynman diagrams and called it the “postdoc cascade.”

  12. 12.

    This is confirmed by physicists active at the time. Dean Rickles and Donald Salisbury, interview with Louis Witten, 17 March 2011, https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/36985. Accessed 12 March 2017.

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    Roberto Lalli

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Lalli, R. (2017). The Renaissance of General Relativity: A New Perspective. In: Building the General Relativity and Gravitation Community During the Cold War . SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54654-4_2

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