The reinvention of general relativity: A historiographical framework for assessing one hundred years of curved space-time

ISIS

Volumn 106, Issue 3, 2015, Pages 598-620

  Blum, Alexander ^a   Lalli, Roberto ^a   Renn, Jürgen ^a  

^a MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HISTORY; PHYSICS;

HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; PHYSICS;

EID: 84946541642     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/683425     Document Type: Article

References (118)

1. Jürgen Renn, ed., The Genesis of General Relativity, 4 vols. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007)
2. Michel Janssen, “‘No Success Like Failure . . .’: Einstein’s Quest for General Relativity, 1907-1920,” in The Cambridge Companion to Einstein, ed. Janssen and Christoph Lehner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 167-227.
3. Don Howard and John Stachel, Einstein and the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, 1) (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987)
4. Jean Eisenstaedt and Anne J. Kox, Studies in the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, 3) (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1992)
5. John Earman Janssen, and John D. Norton, The Attraction of Gravitation: New Studies in the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, 5) (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1993)
6. Hubert Goenner, Renn, Jim Ritter, and Tilman Sauer, The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, 7) (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999)
7. Eisenstaedt and Kox, The Universe of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, 11) (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2005)
8. Lehner, Renn, and Matthias Schemmel, Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics (Einstein Studies, 12) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012)
9. Mara Beller Renn, and Robert S. Cohen, Einstein in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
10. Thomas F. Glick, The Comparative Reception of Relativity (Dordrecht: Springer, 1987)
11. Stanley Goldberg, Understanding Relativity: Origin and Impact of a Scientific Revolution (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1984)
12. Stephen G. Brush, “Why Was Relativity Accepted?” Physics in Perspective, 1999, 1:184-214.
13. Jean Eisenstaedt, “La relativite generale a l’etiage: 1925-1955,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1986, 35:115-185
14. Eisenstaedt, “Trajectoires et impasses de la solution de Schwarzschild,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1987, 37:275-357.
15. Clifford Will, Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 3-18
16. George Ellis, Antonio Lanza, and John Miller, The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
17. Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 258-299.
18. Ivor Robinson, Alfred Schild, and Engelbert L. Schücking, Quasi-stellar Sources and Gravitational Collapse (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1965)
19. B. Kent Harrison, Thorne, Masami Wakano, and John A. Wheeler, Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1965).
20. Joshua Goldberg, “U.S. Air Force Support of General Relativity, 1956-1972,” in Studies in the History of General Relativity, ed. Eisenstaedt and Kox, pp. 89-102
21. Dean Rickles, “The Chapel Hill Conference in Context,” in The Role of Gravitation in Physics: Report from the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference, ed. Cecile DeWitt and Rickles (Berlin: Edition Open Access, 2011), pp. 7-21
22. David Kaiser, “Roger Babson and the Rediscovery of General Relativity,” in “Making Theory: Producing Theory and Theorists in Postwar America” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1987), pp. 567-595
23. Benjamin Wilson, “Calculating Times: Radar, Ballistic Missiles, and Einstein’s Relativity,” in Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, ed. Naomi Oreskes and John Krige (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), pp. 273-316
24. Daniel Kennefick, Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007).
25. David Kaiser, “A is just a? Pedagogy, Practice, and the Reconstitution of General Relativity, 1942-1975,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 1998, 29:321-338
26. Jean Eisenstaedt, The Curious History of Relativity: How Einstein’s Theory of Gravity Was Lost and Found Again (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006)
27. Aaron S. Wright, “The Advantages of Bringing Infinity to a Finite Place: Penrose Diagrams as Objects of Intuition,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 2014, 44:99-139.
28. Abhay Ashtekar, “The Last Fifty Years of General Relativity and Gravitation: From GR3 to GR20 Warsaw Conferences,” General Relativity and Gravitation, 2014, 46, art. 1706
29. Ashtekar, Beverly K. Berger, James Isenberg, and Malcolm A. H. MacCallum, General Relativity and Gravitation: A Centennial Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).
30. Jürgen Renn and Robert Rynasiewicz, “Einstein’s Copernican Revolution,” in Cambridge Companion to Einstein, ed. Janssen and Lehner, pp. 38-71.
31. Peter Galison, “Minkowski’s Space-time: From Visual Thinking to the Absolute World,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1979, 10:85-121
32. Vesselin Petkov, Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).
33. Alexander S. Blum, Jürgen Renn, Donald C. Salisbury, Matthias Schemmel, and Kurt Sundermeyer, “1912: A Turning Point on Einstein’s Way to General Relativity,” Annalen der Physik, 2012, 524:A11-A13.
34. John Stachel, “The Story of Newstein; or, Is Gravity Just Another Pretty Force?” Genesis of General Relativity, Vol. 4, pp. 1041-1078.
35. Peter G. Bergmann, “Unitary Field Theory, Geometrization of Physics, or Physicalization of Geometry,” in Einstein Symposion Berlin aus Anlaß der 100. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages, 25. bis 30. März 1979, ed. H. Nelkowski, A. Hermann, H. Poser, R. Schrader, and R. Seiler (Heidelberg: Springer, 1979), pp. 84-88. Recently, it has been argued convincingly that Einstein himself never viewed geometrization as an essential part of general relativity and instead saw unification (of gravity and inertia) as its main achievement.
36. Dennis Lehmkuhl, “Why Einstein Did Not Believe That General Relativity Geometrizes Gravity,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Phys., 2014, 46:316-326.
37. Jürgen Ehlers, Felix Pirani, and Alfred Schild, “Republication of ‘The Geometry of Free Fall and Light Propagation,’” Gen. Relativ. Gravitation, 2012, 44:1587-1609
38. Andrezej Trautman, “Editorial Note to Jürgen Ehlers, Felix Pirani, and Alfred Schild, ‘The Geometry of Free Fall and Light Propagation,’” Gen. Relativ. Gravitation, pp. 1581-1586.
39. Jürgen Renn and Tilman Sauer, “Pathways out of Classical Physics: Einstein’s Double Strategy in Searching for the Gravitational Field Equation,” Genesis of General Relativity, Vol. 1, pp. 113-312.
40. Michel Janssen, “Arches and Scaffolds: Bridging Continuity and Discontinuity in Theory Change,” in Beyond the Meme: Articulating Dynamic Structures in Cultural Evolution, ed. Alan Love and William Wimsatt (Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
41. Jürgen Renn, “Standing on the Shoulders of a Dwarf: General Relativity-A Triumph of Einstein and Grossmann’s Erroneous Entwurf Theory,” in Universe of General Relativity, ed. Eisenstaedt and Kox , pp. 39-51.
42. John D. Norton, “Einstein, Nordström, and the Early Demise of Scalar, Lorentz Covariant Theories of Gravitation,” in Genesis of General Relativity, ed. Renn, Vol. 3, pp. 413-487.
43. Klaus Hentschel, The Einstein Tower: An Intertexture of Dynamic Construction, Relativity Theory, and Astronomy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997).
44. Hubert Goenner, “Some Remarks on the Genesis of Scalar-Tensor Theories,” Gen. Relativ. Gravitation, 2012, 44:2077-2097.
45. Jeroen van Dongen, Einstein’s Unification (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).
46. John L. Synge, “Introduction to General Relativity,” in Relativity, Groups, and Topology: Lectures Delivered at Les Houches during the 1963 Session of the Summer School of Theoretical Physics, University of Grenoble, ed. Cecile DeWitt and Bryce DeWitt (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1964), pp. 4-88, on p. 4.
47. Bohr’s statement in Niels Bohr, “On the Application of the Quantum Theory to Atomic Structure, I: The Fundamental Postulates of the Quantum Theory,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society: Supplement, 1924, 22:1-42, on p. 35: “The satisfactory manner in which the [light quantum] hypothesis reproduces certain aspects of phenomena is rather suited for supporting the view, which has been advocated from various sides, that, in contrast to the description of natural phenomena in classical physics in which it is always a question only of statistical results of a great number of individual processes, a description of atomic processes in terms of space and time cannot be carried through in a manner free from contradiction by the use of conceptions borrowed from classical electrodynamics, which, up to this time, have been our only means of formulating the principles which form the basis of actual applications of the quantum theory.” But by 1927 there was a consensus, at least within the core of the quantum community, that the new quantum mechanics had provided new conceptions, which made a revision of microscopic space-time geometry unnecessary.
48. Werner Heisenberg, “über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” Zeitschrift für Physik, 1927, 43:172-198.
49. Albert Einstein to Hermann Weyl, 6 Apr. 1918, in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 8: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918, ed. Robert Schulmann, A. J. Kox, Michel Janssen, and Jo zsef Illy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), p. 710.
50. Marco Giovanelli, “‘But One Must Not Legalize the Mentioned Sin’: Phenomenological vs. Dynamical Treatments of Rods and Clocks in Einstein’s Thought,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Phys., 2014, 48:20-44.
51. Hubert Goenner, “On the History of Unified Field Theories,” Living Reviews in Relativity, 2004, 7:2, http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2004-2
52. Catherine Goldstein and Jim Ritter, “The Varieties of Unity: Sounding Unified Theories, 1920-1930,” in Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics: Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel, ed. Abhay Ashtekar, Robert S. Cohen, Don Howard, Jürgen Renn, Sahotra Sarkar, and Abner Shimony (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), pp. 93-150.
53. Tilman Sauer, “Einstein’s Unified Field Theory Program,” in Cambridge Companion to Einstein, ed. Janssen and Lehner , pp. 281-305
54. Matvei Bronstein, “Quantentheorie schwacher Gravitationsfelder,” Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, 1936, 9:140-157.
55. Gennady E. Gorelik and Victor Ya. Frenkel, Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1994)
56. John Stachel, “The Early History of Quantum Gravity (1916-1940),” in Black Holes, Gravitational Radiation, and the Universe, ed. B. R. Iyer and B. Bhawai (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 525-534.
57. Peter G. Bergmann and Johanna H. M. Brunings, “Non-Linear Field Theories, II: Canonical Equations and Quantization,” Reviews of Modern Physics, 1949, 21:480-487
58. Paul A. M. Dirac, “Generalized Hamiltonian Dynamics,” Canadian Journal of Mathematics, 1950, 2:129-148.
59. Vladimir Fock, “Geometrisierung der Diracschen Theorie des Elektrons,” Z. Phys., 1929, 57:261-277
60. Hermann Weyl, “Elektron und Gravitation: I,” Z. Phys., 1929, 56:330-352.
61. Erhard Scholz, “Local Spinor Structures in V. Fock’s and H. Weyl’s Work on the Dirac Equation,” in Geometrie au vingtieme siecle, 1930-2000, ed. D. Flament, J. Kouneiher, P. Nabonnand, and J.-J. Szesceciniarz (Paris: Hermann, 2005), pp. 284-301.
62. Alexander Blum and Dean Rickles, Quantum Gravity in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: A Sourcebook (Berlin: Edition Open Access, forthcoming).
63. Silvan S. Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994).
64. Roger Penrose, “Angular Momentum: An Approach to Combinatorial Space-time,” in Quantum Theory and Beyond, ed. T. Bastin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 151-180.
65. Dean Rickles, A Brief History of String Theory (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), Ch. 7.
66. Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld, and Banesh Hoffmann, “The Gravitational Equations and the Problems of Motion,” Annals of Mathematics, 1938, 39:65-100.
67. In his programmatic 1954 Richtmeyer Memorial Lecture, “Fields and Particles,” Wheeler formulated one of his research questions thus: “In which points of principle, if any, do the disturbances [geons] of smallest mass differ from elementary particles?” The lecture manuscript can be found in the John Archibald Wheeler Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Box 182.
68. In Bergmann and Brunings, “Non-Linear Field Theories, II” (cit. n. 25), p. 480, the authors state: “The motion of field singularities is determined by the field outside the singularities. . . . To this extent, this type of theory is the most nearly self-consistent classical field theory yet devised. . . . The purpose of our present program is to attempt the quantization of such a field theory and to see to what extent the usual divergences of quantum field theory can be avoided.”
69. A second research question formulated in Wheeler’s “Fields and Particles” lecture (cit. n. 29): “What are the distinctions of principle, if any, between the final stages of collapse of the star, and the steps . . . in the decay of a meson?”
70. Jacques Solomon, “Gravitation et quanta,” Journal de Physique et le Radium, 1938, 9:479-485.
71. Charles W. Misner, “Wormhole Initial Conditions,” Physical Review, 1960, 118:1110-1111.
72. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 5: The Swiss Years: Correspondence, 1902-1914, ed. Martin J. Klein, A. J. Kox, and Schulmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), p. 82.
73. Jeffrey Crelinsten, Einstein’s Jury: The Race to Test Relativity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006). That the issue was unsettled at the outset of the renaissance is demonstrated by the different opinions held by two experts who discussed the observational status of general relativity at the “jubilee” conference in Bern in 1955. While Robert J. Trumpler stated that evidence appeared not to contradict the theoretical predictions of general relativity, Erwin Freundlich voiced some doubts on the reliability of the evidence summarized by Trumpler
74. Robert Trumpler, “Observational Results on the Light Deflection and on Red-shift in Star Spectra,” in Fünfzig Jahre Relativitätstheorie: Jubilee of Relativity Theory, Helvetica Physica Acta, Supplementum IV, ed. Andre Mercier and Michel Kervaire (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1956), pp. 106-133.
75. A notable exception is the American physical chemist Richard C. Tolman, who made important contributions to relativistic cosmology and who also wrote the first textbook on the subject: Richard C. Tolman, Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934). The impact of works on cosmological issues concerning the interpretation of the Schwarzschild solution is addressed in Eisenstaedt, “Trajectoires et impasses de la solution de Schwarzschild” (cit. n. 2).
76. Pierre Kerszberg, The Invented Universe: The Einstein-De Sitter Controversy (1916-1917) and the Rise of Relativistic Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). A thorough analysis is in Janssen, “‘No Success Like Failure . . .’”
77. Christopher Smeenk, “Einstein’s Role in the Creation of Relativistic Cosmology,” in Cambridge Companion to Einstein, ed. Janssen and Lehner , pp. 228-269.
78. John D. North, The Measure of the Universe: A History of Modern Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965)
79. Jacques Merleau-Ponty, Cosmologie du XXe siècle: Étude épistémologique et historique des théories de la cosmologie contemporaine (Paris: Gollimard, 1965)
80. Helge Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996)
81. Malcolm Longair, The Cosmic Century: A History of Astrophysics and Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).
82. Markus Fierz and Wolfgang Pauli, “On Relativistic Wave Equations for Particles of Arbitrary Spin in an Electromagnetic Field,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A, 1939, 173:211-232
83. Carl Bryce Seligman, “I: The Theory of Gravitational Interactions; II: The Interaction of Gravitation with Light” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1949).
84. Alexander Blum, “From the Necessary to the Possible: The Genesis of the Spin-Statistics Theorem,” European Physical Journal H, 2014, 39:543-574.
85. Edward A. Milne, Relativity, Gravitation, and World-structure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935)
86. Howard P. Robertson, “Kinematics and World Structure,” Astrophysical Journal, 1935, 82:284-301
87. Arthur G. Walker, “On Milne’s Theory of World Structure,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936, Ser. 2, 42:9-127.
88. George Gale and John Urani, “Milne, Bondi, and the ‘Second Way’ to Cosmology,” in Expanding Worlds of General Relativity, ed. Goenner et al., pp. 343-375.
89. Gale, “Cosmology: Methodological Debates in the 1930s and 1940s,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2014 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/cosmology-30s/.
90. Helge Kragh, “Naming the Big Bang,” Hist. Stud. Nat. Sci., 2014, 44:3-36.
91. George Gamow, “Expanding Universe and the Origin of Elements,” Phys. Rev., 1946, 70:572-573.
92. Jean Eisenstaedt, “Histoire et singularites de la solution de Schwarzschild (1915-1923),” Arch. Hist. Exact Sci., 1982, 27:157-198
93. Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994)
94. Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: Norton, 2003).
95. Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).
96. David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 60-111.
97. Ezra T. Newman, “A Biased and Personal Description of GR at Syracuse University, 1951-1961,” in Universe of General Relativity, ed. Eisenstaedt and Kox, pp. 373-383
98. John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1998)
99. Roger Penrose, “The Rediscovery of Gravity: The Einstein Equation of General Relativity,” in It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Sciences, ed. Graham Farmelo (London: Granta, 2002), pp. 47-79.
100. Dean Rickles, 2011, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/34463.html.
101. Wolfgang Pauli, “Schlußwort den Präsidenten der Konferenz,” in Fünfzig Jahre Relativitätstheorie, ed. Mercier and Kervaire (cit. n. 36), pp. 261-267
102. William McCrea, “Jubilee of Relativity Theory: Conference at Berne,” Nature, 1955, 176:330-331
103. Peter Bergmann, “Fifty Years of Relativity,” Science, 1956, 123:487-494.
104. John Stachel, “The Cauchy Problem in General Relativity-The Early Years,” in Studies in the History of General Relativity, ed. Eisenstaedt and Kox, pp. 407-418.
105. Aleksei Z. Petrov, “Klassifikacya prostranstv opredelyayushchikh polya tyagoteniya,” Uchenye Zapiski Kazanskogo Universiteta: Seriya Fiziko-Matematicheskie Nauki, 1954, 114:55-69
106. Felix Pirani, “Invariant Formulation of Gravitational Radiation Theory,” Phys. Rev., 1957, 105:1089-1099
107. Roy Kerr, “Gravitational Field of a Spinning Mass as an Example of Algebraically Special Metrics,” Physical Review Letters, 1963, 11:237-238.
108. A preliminary study of the publication venues of papers on general relativity and gravitation listed in the twenty-one volumes of the Bulletin on General Relativity and Gravitation shows that such articles were widely dispersed in journals devoted to physics, mathematics, and astronomy/astrophysics and in general scientific journals, especially those connected to national or local scientific societies. Between 1948 and 1962, about 1,400 papers in the field of general relativity and gravitation were published in more than two hundred journals, in at least six different languages. Moreover, the politics of publication still followed very local dynamics. Before 1960, Bergmann, e.g., published almost exclusively in Physical Review and other journals of the American Physical Society. The Physical Review, in turn, published almost exclusively papers written by American physicists or physicists who were working in American institutions at that time. Lichnerowicz and Tonnelat published their papers in French journals; Infeld’s preferred publication venues were Polish journals such as Acta Physica Polonica and the Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Science; and so forth.
109. Andre Mercier, “Editorial,” Gen. Relativ. Gravitation, 1970, 1:1-7
110. Alan Held, Heinrich Leutwyler, and Peter Bergmann, “To Andre Mercier on the Occasion of His Retirement,” Gen. Relativ. Gravitation, 1978, 9:759-762.
111. An interesting historical project would be to investigate the parallels with the emergence of the foundations of quantum mechanics as a subdiscipline in its own right in the late twentieth century.
112. Relativistic Theories of Gravitation: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Warsaw and Jablonna, July 1962, ed. Leopold Infeld (Oxford: Pergamon, 1964), pp. 219-222.
113. Claus Kiefer, Quantum Gravity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 15-22.
114. Alexander Rueger, “Attitudes towards Infinities: Responses to Anomalies in Quantum Electrodynamics, 1927-1947,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1992, 22:309-337.
115. James T. Cushing, Theory Construction and Selection in Modern Physics: The S-Matrix (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
116. Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).
117. Bryce DeWitt, “Quantum Theories of Gravity,” Gen. Relativ. Gravitation, 1970, 1:181-189
118. Daniele Oriti, Approaches to Quantum Gravity: Toward a New Understanding of Space, Time, and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).