Roberto Lalli

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

The history of the theory of general relativity presents unique features. After its discovery, the theory was immediately confirmed and rapidly changed established notions of space and time. The further implications of general relativity, however, remained largely unexplored until the mid 1950s, when it came into focus as a physical theory and gradually returned to the mainstream of physics. This essay presents a historiographical framework for assessing the history of general relativity by taking into account in an integrated narrative intellectual developments, epistemological problems, and technological advances; the characteristics of post–World War II and Cold War science; and newly emerging institutional settings. It argues that such a framework can help us understand this renaissance of general relativity as a result of two main factors: the recognition of the untapped potential of general relativity and an explicit effort at community building, which allowed this formerly disparate and dispersed field to benefit from the postwar changes in the scientific landscape.

The Reception of Miller's Ether-Drift Experiments in the USA: The History of a Controversy in Relativity Revolution

Summary This paper analyses documents from several US archives in order to examine the controversy that raged within the US scientific community over Dayton C. Millers ether-drift experiments. In 1925, Miller announced that his repetitions of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment had shown a slight but positive result: an ether-drift of about 10 kilometres per second. Millers discovery triggered a long debate in the US scientific community about the validity of Einsteins relativity theories. Between 1926 and 1930 some researchers repeated the Michelson-Morley experiment, but no one found the same effect as Miller had. The inability to confirm Millers result, paired with the fact that no other ether theory existed that could compete with special relativity theory, made his result an enigmatic one. It thus remained of little interest to the scientific community until 1954, when Robert S. Shankland and three colleagues reanalysed the data and proposed that Millers periodic fringe shift could be attributed to temperature effects. Whereas most of the scientific community readily accepted this explanation as the conclusion of the matter, some contemporary anti-relativists have contested Shanklands methodology up to now. The historical accounts of Millers experiments provide contradictory reports of the reaction of the US scientific community and do not analyse the mechanisms of the controversy. I will address this shortcoming with an examination of private correspondence of several actors involved in these experiments between 1921 and 1955. A complex interconnection of epistemic elements, sociological factors, and personal interests played a fundamental role in the closure of this experimental controversy in the early 1930s, as well as in the reception of Shanklands reanalysis in the 1950s.

The Renaissance of General Relativity: A New Perspective

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.

From Crisis to a New Institutional Body

This chapter focuses on the period between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, regarded as the maturity phase of the “General Relativity and Gravitation” community. During this phase, many tensions of different kinds emerged and seriously jeopardized the existence of an institutional structure for promoting general relativity at the international level. These tensions ranged from cultural differences to generational struggles, from disciplinary rivalries to political conflicts. All of them became urgent matters of debate when the international conference held in the Soviet Union in September 1968 was dramatically affected by the recent military conflicts of the Six-Day War and of the armed invasion of Czechoslovakia. Under strained political circumstances, scientists attempted to draw a clear boundary between scientific and political matters. In the attempt to do so, the participants came to hold very different views about how these demarcations should be defined in the specific context of the activities of an international scientific institution during the Cold War. Despite the various conflicts, the institution was able to survive: this period ended with the transformation of the International Committee on General Relativity and Gravitation into the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation—whose statute came to embody the political and other tensions characterizing its establishment.

The Formative Phase of the GRG Community

This chapter analyzes the first decade of the process of building the community of “relativists” from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. This period can be seen as the formative phase of the emerging community, during which the initial steps were taken to institutionally unify the different research agendas under the heading of “General Relativity and Gravitation.” These included the organization of the first international conference on general relativity held in Bern in 1955, the establishment of the International Committee on General Relativity in Gravitation in 1959, and the decision to publish the Bulletin on General Relativity and Gravitation from 1962 onward. It is argued that some of the initial impetus to build the international community was related to idealistic views about the role of science in achieving peaceful relations between nations. By the end of the formative phase, however, many tensions of both a political and epistemic nature came to dominate the discussions about the future of the committee as it had to face sudden changes in the social composition of the community as well as in the redefinition of the field after the discovery of quasars in 1963 and the emergence of relativistic astrophysics.

(Re-)Establishing International Cooperation After World War II

The complex landscape of the scientific institutions operating at the international level in the post-World War II period is outlined here. Around the mid-1950s, when the community-building activities connected to general relativity first began, a reconfiguration of these institutions for the promotion and organization of international cooperation in science was under way. The motivations for, and constraints of, this transformation were defined by the world order that was being constructed after the end of World War II and by the evolution of the Cold War. For those willing to create a new structure for promoting general relativity in the international arena, these existing institutions provided both a model to follow and a larger established structure with which to interact. It is argued that one of the major structural changes in institutions such as the International Unions was that they began promoting specific areas of research at this point, while before World War II their role was limited to define international standards. Besides these structural changes in scientific institutions, the second major element was the changing political context related to the post-Stalinist reforms in the Soviet Union and the related detente in international relations that led to an increasing participation of Soviet scientists in international scientific institutions.

‘The Renaissance of Physics’: Karl K. Darrow (1891–1982) and the Dissemination of Quantum Theory at the Bell Telephone Laboratories

Karl K. Darrow was a central actor in the reception of quantum theory in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He was the first industrial physicist to dedicate his entire working time to the dissemination of novel concepts and theoretical tools by means of long review papers. The present paper analyzes the evolution of Darrow’s narratives of quantum theory and shows that Darrow’s reviews aimed at substantiating the view that physics was an evolutionary process. The paper argues that this view was connected to Darrow’s peculiar activity at the Bell Labs as well as to the contemporaneous attempts of leading American scientists to build an ideology of national science.